West
by princesswingnut
Summary: Think being able to thieve, rescue princesses and control the elements means you can control your own destiny? Think again. Benjamin can’t even learn to shut up. And with a master like Lord Amun that could be a problem. The story, from his turning to BD.
1. Chapter 1

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Welcome to the last installment of the Compass Points series. If you're new to the series, don't worry, they're all stand-alones. You absolutely don't have to have read the rest of them to understand this one, this is me building a story up from the ground. If you're interested, though, you can find them on my profile page, "South" (Jasper Fic), "East" (Leah Fic), and "North" (Benjamin Fic). Anyway this is about Benjamin from "Breaking Dawn" (or Avatar Benjamin :) as I've heard people calling him). Obviously there wasn't time in the book to really get into his character, so I went for it myself. Offhand notes: 1) If you spot mistakes or inconsistencies, please point them out to me. I count on you guys for that, and you are dang good at it :). 2) Unlike previous fics, darling Benjamin will not be heading off on an immediate road trip in the direction of the title. Don't be concerned. He will just be heading west later this time, rather than sooner. This is pre-vampire Benjamin, and his story all the way through vampirism and right up to Breaking Dawn.

God, I always hate it when these things end up so long. Sorry. Enjoy!

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"I don't believe you, Ben. You can't do it."

"I can do it."

"You _can't._ It's impossible!"

"I can do anything."

True statement? Not necessarily. But there were some days when I believed it, and anyway it was too late to back down now. I was standing with Ashai next to the highest wall in Cairo, giving ourselves neck cricks by staring up the full height of it. Sizing it up like we would a rival.

Did I want to climb this wall? No way. Did I _look _crazy? You could kill yourself falling off something like this, not to _mention _what was on the other side of it. But, well—she was really pretty.

All right, so maybe, technically, I'd gotten myself into this. I guess I had, technically…bragged that I could steal Lord Amun's cane.

Yeah.

See, here's the problem—my brain seemed to be directly attached to my mouth, with nothing in between. If I thought it, I said it, and it always seemed like a good idea at the time. It was just afterwards, when I really started to realize what had come out of my mouth and had to deal with the consequences—it was only then that it wasn't as fun.

It was especially difficult while I was a teenage boy, because I was automatically obligated to back up any stupid boast I might make. It had gotten me into a few tight spots before—but not this tight. No, this one was definitely the new record for Let's See How Stupid Benjamin Can Be And Still Get Away With It. Depending on how it turned out, actually, it might end up being a totally different record altogether.

But what the hell, you know? I was broke anyway, hadn't pulled off a successful job in almost a week, and if I didn't steal _something _I was going to starve. I was a good thief. Maybe I could do this. I didn't see any other options at the moment, because she was _so _pretty. I had been trying for _so _long to impress her—I'd climbed national monuments, I'd stolen neckties off of sleeping men. If this was finally what I had to do to impress her, then that only meant she was a really top-notch sort of girl.

"Oh yeah," I said with transparent false confidence. "I've climbed higher walls, Ash, this is…nothing."

She was _not _buying it. "Well then, let's see you do it," she said, crossing her arms. I don't even know if you could technically call us friends. She mostly seemed to just tolerate me, which I was okay with. As long as she still wanted me around.

"What, _now?_" I had been plotting alternatives already—where could I steal a really expensive walking stick that could maybe pass for Lord Amun's? But that would be _hard, _everyone recognized that stick—with that famous silver lion head at the top, everyone was _used _to seeing him striding through the streets with that walking stick, and God help you if you got in his way. It would be nearly impossible to pull off a fake. "It's not even dark!"

"So?" she challenged. "I thought you could do anything."

"I meant that in a really impressive, vague way!" I said, exasperated. "You're not supposed to take me _seriously!_"

Instead of responding, she grabbed me by the back of my shirt and threw me behind a fruit stand. This wasn't the reaction that I usually got from girls, but for Ashai it was always possible something like this was going to happen. I'd gotten used to it.

"Hey!" I objected anyway, pulling myself back up. "You can't just go around—"

"Get _down,_" she hissed. "It's Suliman! Are you _stupid? _Get down!"

All objections gone. I hit the ground like it was suddenly my best friend, pressing myself back against the wooden cart so hard I could feel the splinters. I watched out of the corner of my eye for the fruit seller—I doubt he would be crazy about me hiding behind his date display, I didn't exactly look like an upstanding member of society—but most of my attention was devoted to the person who was walking up to Ashai right now. If I tilted my head to the side, I could see half of his face—small-eyed and spatulated, black-hole black-eyed. I was careful not to lean out too far.

"Where is he?" No mistaking _that _voice. Not that screwdriver nastiness, its sound seeming twisted and dried from too many days in the sun. I made a face.

"Where is who?" Ashai asked—she'd already assumed a careless lounging pose against the far wall, the casual street girl with absolutely nothing to hide. It worked okay if you were cute.

"_Benjamin,_" Suliman said, with the frustration of a person who knew they shouldn't have to explain. "I know you were with him this morning, so why don't you just _tell _me where he is."

"I haven't seen Benjamin in days," she lied with a straight face. That was about the first thing you learned to do in the street, was lie your head off. Right after stealing. You got those two down, and you were going to be okay. "Maybe he died."

"Oh, are you going to lie to me, Ashai? Do you really think that's smart?"

Here's a short primer on the Cairo police force. First and most importantly: they are crooked as a bendy straw. You must take this into account in everything that you do, especially if your chosen career happens to fall on the wrong side of the law. If you're a well-off criminal type, no worries—bribery is your best friend. Learn it. Live by it. Pay it on time. If you are, on the other hand, one of those people who wake up in the morning wondering if they'll manage to eat today, you're in a slightly different situation. Mostly you should just avoid the police, and you should learn that there are places and organizations that you do _not _steal from. You just don't do it.

Most of these people and places are those who are handing out the bribes, but on a simpler level, it's probably best not to steal from the policemen themselves.

Maybe this seems like a no-brainer. Yeah, well. You haven't heard the story.

The first part was down to a stupid mistake—cops don't _always _dress like cops, you see. But even when they're off duty, if you try to pickpocket them, they are going to catch you. And they are not going to like that so much.

Long story short, this guy Suliman broke my jaw. It was…not good. First of all, when you're on the street with a definite lack of medical care, a broken anything is very bad news. I still shudder to think what would have happened if I'd gotten an infection, if it hadn't set right—well, I got lucky. But I was _not _going to let it go.

It took me awhile to set up my revenge, I'll tell you that. I had to find out who he was with only my vague memories to go on—_well, he's got this sort of a nose, right? Like someone maybe hit him with a bat? And alligator eyes—you know what I mean by alligator eyes? _Then once I'd finally found out who he was, I had to find out where he lived, when he worked, what shifts he took regularly, _everything _about his schedule. What his house looked like. How many rooms. What restaurants he liked to visit. _Everything. _And then I made my move.

First, I took everything of value—money, watches, electronics…vaguely metallic-looking belt buckles. Then I turned everything else upside down—and I mean that in a totally literal way, like I really picked up everything in his house and turned it was quite a production—he worked eight-hour shifts on a normal day, and it took me nearly that long to finish it. I turned over furniture, food, potted plants, plates in cabinets, everything that wasn't nailed down.

Then I went in his bedroom, found his sock drawer, and took every single left sock.

It was awesome. It was _beautiful. _It was a beautiful heist, and I've been trading on the legend of it ever since. Unfortunately, Suliman didn't find it quite so hilarious, and he's been after me to tell me so in person. I didn't care. It was worth it. It did, I'll admit, make my life a little more difficult. I wasn't sure whether he wanted to arrest me or kill me, but either way he definitely wanted to get his hands on me, and that necessitated a lot of hiding behind fruit carts, most days. I was sure he'd eventually get over it.

My friends and acquaintances took a significantly less chill approach to my personal Javert, though, because they were the ones getting harassed by Suliman day in and day out. "All of you," Suliman was currently snarling at Ashai. "All of you _protecting _that little son of a bitch, you all need to learn to get out of the way. He's not worth it to you, I promise. He's not worth what'll happen if you don't."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Ashai said icily. She wasn't having fun anymore, and I could see her starting to move away, blowing him off.

He let her get a step and a half away, and then he grabbed her arm and pulled her back. "I don't think you understand me," he said. This was a man whose patience had entirely run out—I could tell by the sound of him.

"Oh, I think I understand you perfectly," Ashai told him. "And I said no."

This was the point where things were about to get ugly. Suliman was ugly already, no two ways about that, but for Ashai to get ugly too? Well, that would have been a travesty. So I sighed quietly to myself, got my feet under me, and stood up.

"Hey," I said loudly, appearing suddenly from behind the dates. "Hi. Right here."

"Huh. Weird," Ashai deadpanned. "How on Earth could he have gotten there."

You can go ahead and give me the benefit of the doubt and assume that I was being a gentleman here, that I was out to save Ashai and defend her honor or whatnot. That's possible. That might have been it. Or maybe it was another one of those things that just seemed like a good idea at the time.

At any rate, it worked. Suliman turned and saw me and forgot about Ashai altogether, dropping her arm and coming after me like he might climb straight over the date display. This worked out for us too, because it gave Ashai the perfect opportunity to hook her foot in front of his and trip him neatly before we both split off in separate directions.

Usually I liked to have specific escape routes planned out, just in case this kind of thing happens (it happens more often than you might think). This wasn't exactly our part of town, though, so the plan here was more just pick-a-direction-and-run. I picked left.

Left worked out okay for awhile—ran through a few side-streets, yelled sorry for pushing a few people out of the way—but then it abruptly and upsettingly stopped working. This was because of a thing we like to call a dead end. I don't know if you've run into any of those before, but a dead end when you're going down a street that you think leads somewhere, and then bam! You run into a wall. No way out. Dead end. In the best of circumstances it's an inconvenience, but sometimes—like when you're running away from an angry, vengeful cop—it can be downright lethal.

I'd managed to run in an almost half-circle around Lord Amun's wall, and now I was at the end of an alley with that wall directly in front of me. Just standing right there, waiting for me. Right in front of me.

_Okay, life, _I said. _All right. I can take a hint._ At least it was darker than it had been twenty minutes ago—the evening starting to hit that dusky pre-night phase where the temperature dropped from Scorching Egg-Frying Death to Mild Sunburn. It never fully cooled, not in the summer—not even during the night. Just as the pavement and sand were starting to lose their sun heat, the _instant _that they finally cooled—well, the sun would come back up again. Welcome to Cairo.

It was just _barely _getting dark, though, and it gave me the necessary cover and courage to size up that wall again, quicker this time and with more purpose. It seemed to be made of some kind of rough sandstone, which was better than what it could have been, but still, to climb this kind of wall you usually wanted to have rope, or something. Oh well. Desperate times. I heard Suliman turn into the alley behind me, and I put my hands on the wall and started climbing.

I'd always been good at climbing stone. Even things that seemed sheer, that seemed impossible—I don't know, I always managed to find niches in the stone, unexpected holds. I don't know what it was. It had just always worked that way for me.

All right, if you must know, weird things like that happened to me a lot. Things that didn't hurt me as much as they should have. Things that didn't stop me like they should have. My entire family had gone into the water when our boat had gone down off the coast of Alexandria when I was nine, and I was the only one who had ever come out. Didn't drown. Never came close.

I was just lucky, I guess.

The luckiness was definitely coming into question, though, as I scrambled up the wall and left Suliman yelling at me below. Yeah, this was really subtle. Really hanging onto the element of surprise here. I made it to the top of the wall and pulled myself up, not daring to stand—I was something like thirty feet off the ground, and my balance wasn't great. I didn't want to die.

So here I was kneeling on the top of the wall, with Suliman yelling on one side and the guards on the other side starting to notice the yelling. They looked up, saw me, and chimed in with some yelling of their own, pointing and shouting things that I wished I could hear.

This, also, I think could qualify as a dead end.

Emphasis on _dead. _

I pushed myself reluctantly up to my feet and ran carefully down the length of the wall, _away _from the wall ladder about fifty feet down the line from me, the one that was being immediately climbed by not one but three guards, all apparently crazy enough to want to get up on this eight-inch-wide walltop with me.

I wasn't sure what my plan was exactly, but even the instinctive running-away plan came slamming to a halt when I saw where I was headed. Toward another wall ladder about ten feet in front of me, also being swarmed up by overexcited guards. I had no other options, though, and there were _less _guards headed up this ladder, so I kept going. I got there first.

Every step I got down that ladder was less far I potentially had to fall, so I was happy to make it even halfway down. That was where I ran into the first guard, and we had an extremely awkward, short squabble over the next rung. I won, but mostly by accident—my foot slammed right into the back of his head, and he was _out, _falling soundlessly the last ten feet. I scrambled quickly down another few rungs, but as I got closer to the ground I felt a hand wrap around my ankle and drag me down, jerking my grip free of the ladder.

I only had a few seconds to panic before I hit the ground right next to the fallen guard, but I wasn't as far up as I thought. I wasn't dead when I hit—I was just in a lot of pain. I broke my fall a little with my forearms and rolled with it, flopping gracelessly over onto my back, breathless, a thousand bruises forming—I could feel them already, every spot that I'd be hurting in the morning. Assuming that I was—you know…alive.

As I rolled over, a boot came down hard on my chest, pinning me to the ground and adding pretty badly to the breathlessness. It was a guard. He was _really _big—or maybe he just seemed like that because I was looking up at him from the ground. But no, he was probably just that big, and he was _scary. _I looked up at him and he did _not _look happy. He was not thrilled to see me, he was _not _happy that I'd gotten in here where no one was supposed to be able to get in, and he was going to do something about it.

Well. There went my luck.


	2. Chapter 2

I poked my tongue into the back of the mouth, exploring the back row of my molars, looking for the tooth that I thought might be loose. This wasn't a huge concern—of course I wasn't going to be making it to a dentist anytime soon, but it was just a molar. Who really used molars? I had a couple extra that I wouldn't miss.

There it was. It moved the instant my tongue hit it, wobbling back and forth in the gum like when I was seven years old, losing my baby teeth. But when I was seven, they were _supposed _to come out. If this one fell out, it would be because I'd been punched repeatedly in the mouth. Not exactly natural causes, and if it fell out, it would hurt. This was the sort of thing that people went and got root canals for.

It really could have been worse. I'd been _expecting _worse, I'd honestly expected to be killed on the spot and dumped in the river. It wasn't like anyone would miss me—and some of these old-blood lords ran their property like their own little kingdoms. Egypt was a practical country; everything was about the money. Have enough of it, and you could do what you wanted—and killing me definitely fell within those rights.

But I was still alive for the minute, and I was optimistic. If they had wanted to kill me, they would have just killed me, right? _(Right??)_ Instead I got dragged halfway across the complex in the falling dark, spitting blood onto the expensive marble walkways that led into the even more expensive marble buildings. Honestly, it boggled my mind to try to imagine how much all of this would have cost. The nearest marble quarry was what, two hundred miles away? And then it would have to be transported, and shaped, and ow. Ow. My head. I couldn't understand it.

When I saw what building we were going into, I started to really get worried. There was a series of smaller buildings scattered over the grounds, but there was mostly just one really big one. And that was where we were headed, right in that front door.

"This is all a huge mistake," I informed them, loudly and continuously. "It's a mistake! I swear to you my intentions were totally innocent, this was all an accident, I don't even want to _be _here. If you let me go I will honestly just skedaddle out that front gate and you will _never _see me again. How do we feel about that? Do you want to just let me go? Yeah?"

No. These weren't the kinds of guards that were hired for their intelligence—I don't know if my words were even getting past their Cro-Magnon skulls. Pretty much the plan was just to keep trying, though, because I didn't have much else to lose.

"Why are we going in there?" I narrated nervously as the huge double doors swung open. "We don't need to go in there. What's in there? We don't need to go in there!"

We went in there. We went in those doors and down a long, unnecessarily dark hallway, and stopped in front of a closed door at the end.

"I don't want to go in there," I said.

Apparently I still had no say in the matter. One guard raised his fist and knocked three times, and the door swung open like the entrance to a haunted house. At least the hinges didn't squeak.

It became less creepy and mysterious once I realized that the door had been opened by a guard standing inside the room. But only marginally less creepy. The room was as dark as the hallway had been, maybe darker—lit only by a fire in the fireplace. A _fire? _I felt the heat wash over me as I came into the room—who was crazy enough to build a _fire _in the middle of an Egyptian summer? Who in their right mind even _owned _a fireplace in Egypt?

It took me a few minutes to spot the man sitting in the armchair—he seemed to have positioned himself in the absolute deepest part of the shadows, the perfect black hole of creepy looming. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I started to make out the lines of his face and body, leaned back in the chair with his eyes coming up over a book and his walking stick laid across his legs. Watching me.

The guard to my left gave me a significant look, but when I didn't immediately get it, he helpfully shoved me to my knees. I glared back up at him, but stayed down. I still didn't want to die.

"And who is this?"

It was the first time I'd ever heard Lord Amun's voice—I'd done my share of scrambling to get out of his way since I'd come to Cairo, but I'd never heard his voice. It sounded like a mirror, slick silver and reflective, like an oil slick, like mother of pearl. Like the way oil is when it drips into the streets and spreads across the cracks in the pavement, rainbowing where the sun hits it straight on.

For the first time since I'd gotten inside these walls, I shut up.

"We caught this intruder climbing into the courtyard," reported Guard 1. "He was being chased by a policeman and seems to be in possession of a number of stolen goods."

"Climbing into the courtyard?" Lord Amun leaned forward a little, into the firelight so I could finally see his face, sharp-boned, handsome in a frostbitten old-blood way. It wasn't a face that you forgot. "How, exactly, did he accomplish that?"

"I don't know, my lord," the guard admitted. "We didn't see him until he was already on top of the wall. It appears that he somehow—climbed."

"Did he." It was the voice of mild interest, but not enough interest to save me. If only there was something _really_ spectacular about me! Like if I had blue skin. Or knew how to fly. As it was, I was just the kid who had climbed into his courtyard. "Well, Ishak, you know what we do with thieves."

"Yes, sir."

That didn't sound good. I considered my chances of making a run for it. Also not good.

"And so you bothered me…why?" Amun's voice was resting in that delicate thin-ice register that could so easily fall through to dangerous. Ishak needed to watch his step.

"Oh, I, ah—I…" He knew it, too. One look from those strange dark eyes—were they…_red? _Surely they weren't _red—_and he'd gone from hulking masculine security guard to shifty-eyed scolded child. Suddenly stuttering over the hundred words in his vocabulary. "We just needed the sword."

I stopped breathing.

Of course we'd all heard the stories. The way they used to punish thieves back in the old kingdom. I didn't know people even _had _swords anymore, let alone upheld that tradition. I knew thieves who woke up in cold sweats at night from nightmares of losing their hands, of watching them disappear behind a sword. No matter how far gone the tradition was, it was always a fear that was really going to hit home for those who lived and died by their hands.

"Of course," Lord Amun said, already turning back to his book. "You know where it is."

I went for the door. I didn't even mean to, it wasn't like I thought I could make it. It was totally involuntary, a gut reaction to the thought of getting my hands chopped off, panic so strong that I didn't even stop when Ishak grabbed the back of my collar, feet still moving and going nowhere. I reached back with both hands, trying to claw his grip free finger by finger, and he gave me a brisk shake like I was a puppy.

"Kahled, give me a hand here," he said to the other guard. "The sword?"

Guard 2 was more than happy to oblige. He walked across the room, kind of skirting sideways around Amun as if he might suddenly attack—this, I think, was just instinctual—and found the sword hanging on the wall.

It wasn't a straight sword, not the kind that would have been used by a knight or a sous chef—it was one of those curved kinds, and more frightening for the curve of it, somehow much more terrifying as he pulled it off the wall.

"No," I said. "No no no no no no no no."

I was cutting off my own air now, pulling away from Ishak so hard that the collar of my shirt was choking me, and honestly I would rather choke than this, I would rather die. I had this image in my head of me with stumps where my hands used to be, bleeding out, me on the streets with no hands—I would rather die.

Ishak made a frustrated noise and yanked me around, shoving me back down to my knees and slamming my hands flat on the coffee table, palms down, pressing them so hard into the wood that I could feel my bones shift and creak. I threw my head back and slammed it into his face as he bent over me, and I felt blood spatter onto my neck from his nose and mouth.

"Damn it!" he yelled, his grip breaking momentarily and then coming down harder on my hands, pinning me down as Kahled swung the sword over me, firelight running for a moment down the length of the blade. "Hurry _up!_"

I saw the sword travel all the way to the top of his swing, and I saw it start to come down again, but it never got there—just as Kahled was bringing the sword down, the fire suddenly flared in the fireplace, flaming up like someone had thrown gasoline on it, exploding so hard it escaped the fireplace altogether and wrapped its tongues around Kahled's ankles, catching him on fire and distracting him pretty effectively from what he was supposed to be doing.

He screamed and dropped the sword, and it landed point-first two inches from my fingertips, burying its whole tip in the wood. I stared at it, quivering in front of my face, and tried to remember breathing. It was something about the lungs. Something about air coming in, air going out—I couldn't seem to quite remember.

I heard Ishak mutter "Screw this," beneath Kahled's panicked screams, and he reached across and grabbed the sword himself, dragging me back up and putting the sword to my throat, a true professional. Getting the job done. I could feel his blood in my hair and on the back of my neck. He pulled my head back and—

"Stop!"

The sword was halfway to my throat already, but I could _see _it freeze—no denying that voice. Even Kahled stopped screaming. I saw Lord Amun rise from his chair, a single fluid motion, and somehow with the sword and the blood and the flames, he was the thing that I was paying attention to. My eyes were on him.

"Stop," he said more quietly. "Don't kill him. I've changed my mind."


	3. Chapter 3

This was awkward.

I was still kneeling on the floor in Lord Amun's study, hadn't dared to even move even though no one was there to make me stay anymore. The guards had left the room, I didn't know why. He'd just ordered them out, waved them off and off they'd gone, right out the door, leaving me in the room with this terrifying person who I could barely see for the shadows. Even the fire had gone out—after it had flared up like that and caught Kahled on fire, it had died right back down, snuffed out like a candle. I didn't know what the hell was going on with that fire, actually, but it wasn't the weirdest thing I'd seen in this house.

I didn't know why he hadn't killed me. I didn't know why he'd stopped them from cutting my hands off. It had come so _close, _they would have done it except for that freak accident. That would not have been so fun, but at least I would have understood what was going on. Now I didn't get it at all. What was _happening? _He'd stopped them from cutting off my hands, but what did that mean? Did it mean that he didn't want my hands cut off…or that he'd thought of something worse?

I had my eyes down, I didn't want to meet his freaky, possibly-red eyes. That was not my favorite. It made me feel slightly better _not_ to look him in the eyes, but that also meant that I had no warning when his cane snaked across the space between us and slid under my chin, tipping my head up. I balked and slapped it away, acting on instinct and not the smartest one at that—it earned me an immediate crack across the ribs from that cane, and then it was back under my chin. The way that someone would react to a dog that had misbehaved, quick punishment and then expectation of obedience. I have to tell you, I was getting really sick of this.

But this time I let him tip my head back, turning it from side to side—any minute I swear he would start checking my teeth, what was _up _with this guy? Not even speaking to me, just assessing me somehow, and for something that I couldn't hope to figure out. The reason that he hadn't killed me.

"What's your name, boy?" he asked me, cool and impersonal.

"Benjamin," I said. "Benjamin Nikopolous."

"Nikopolous. That's Greek."

"Yes, sir."

"How old are you?"

"Seventeen."

"Seventeen," he mused, bringing the cane back to his side. It probably couldn't even be classified as a cane—it was one of those things that rich men carry because they can, not because they need them. Because they have silver lions on the top and because they might need something to hit people with. You never knew. "Benjamin, can you tell me what happened with the fire?"

"With the fire?" I said blankly. He didn't seem to be kidding—looking at me expectantly, waiting for me to explain. I gave it my best shot. "Um. Hmm. Well, it kind of—flared up. And then it caught the guard on fire. And then it went out?"

"True," he said with a touch of impatience. "Can you tell me why it did that?"

He had me. I didn't know what he wanted, but I was obviously not giving it to him. "I…really can't," I said helplessly. "Sorry."

"Hmm," he said.

He reached over to the fireplace and plucked a matchbox off the mantel. I watched it with the paranoia of a person who always thinks everything is going to hurt him, and for good reason. The paranoia of a teenager living on the street, who's been injured by everything from stilettos to saltshakers. It was why I was still alive, I was _great _at paranoia.

"You don't know how that happened?" he repeated.

What did he want? The scientific reasoning for it? Because I didn't know that. My craziest ideas about it? Because he probably didn't want to hear those. "I have no idea what happened, sir," I said firmly.

"You don't know how you did that?"

"How _I _did that?" I asked, floored. "I…didn't. I didn't do that! Are you kidding?" Whoops. Memo to self: must not yell at Egyptian lord.

"Apparently," he said dryly. He slid the matchbox open and struck the first match, watching it burn for a few seconds before leaning over casually and dropping it on me.

I hadn't been expecting this. It wasn't something that normal people did. As the match hit me I immediately brushed it off, a short burst of panic as I remembered Kahled trying to put the fire out on his leg, but I didn't need to worry. The match went out the moment it hit me. Luckily.

"Hmm," he said again, and lit another match.

"What are you doing?" I yelled, forgetting the lesson I'd learned about that just a minute ago. But he was dropping _matches _on me, he was _crazy. _I brushed another match off as he dropped it on me, but it had already gone out. Out the moment that it hit me.

"I thought so," he said with calm satisfaction, even though I could see _nothing _he had to be satisfied about. I was going crazy here trying to figure this out.

He lit a third match and then reached across and grabbed my wrist, dragging me off my knees and pressing the match to my sleeve. The fire caught almost instantly, licking up the side of my arm, and I tried to pull away from him but he held me, content to sit there and watch me burn.

"Are you _crazy?_" I yelled as the heat started to prick my skin, burning through the fabric with new-fire hunger, teeth and claws. I jerked back hard, but he was _strong, _stronger than I'd expected, I couldn't move, couldn't do anything but watch the fire burn me to death.

Except then it went out.

It just went out, just like that. One minute there was fire, and then it was gone, like a blown-out birthday candle—leaving my sleeve smoking and burned, but not on fire.

Lord Amun apparently didn't find this surprising. I sat there staring at my arm as if it might light back on fire at any second, staring at it hoping it would offer up some sort of an explanation. Lord Amun just let go and sat back in his chair, letting me fall back onto my knees.

"What the hell," I said quietly, running my hand over the burn marks. "What the _hell_ is going on?"

"You have a talent," Lord Amun informed me.

"I have a lot of talents," I said uneasily. I did. Climbing. Smiling. Cooking. Swimming. Parcheesi. Though I doubted he was talking about Parcheesi.

"You seem to be able to manipulate flame," he specified.

I did some more staring blankly at him. (I was getting good at this.) "What?" was my brilliant reply.

"You can," he said more slowly, "manipulate—"

"No, I heard what you said," I snapped. "It was just really stupid and crazy, that's why I said 'what?'"

"Excuse me?" Fortunately, he seemed to be more amused by me than angry, because I did keep forgetting not to be stupid. It was another one of my talents.

"I'm sorry," I said with difficulty, "That was really stupid and crazy, _sir._"

"It's only a minor ability," he mused. "I doubt you even have any control over it. It probably hasn't helped you much, I'm not surprised you haven't noticed. Very minor ability. Well, we can fix that."

I was almost tempted to stop talking. It sure didn't seem to have any effect on him, he wasn't even listening anymore. _Almost _tempted. "I don't know what you mean," I said loudly. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Be quiet," he said sharply, "and come here." I didn't move. I didn't want to get any closer to him, he was mean and frightening and he was possibly very evil. Also he kept lighting me on fire. He didn't wait for me to decide—the cane lashed out like an extension of his arm, hooking me by the collar of my shirt and dragging me forward. "Come _here._"

He grabbed me as soon as I got close, with two hands this time, fingers wrapping around my shoulder and arm. "Stay still," he said. And then he bit me.

I'm serious. He leaned over, opened his mouth, and bit me on the neck, and he bit me _hard. _Hard enough that I actually felt his teeth punch through my skin, so hard that I knew he'd probably done this before. He _bit _me.

"OW!" I yelled, shoving him away and clapping a hand to my injured neck. "YOU _BIT _ME! I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU BIT ME!"

"You should probably lie down," he told me, leaning back into his chair again.

"LIE _DOWN? _ARE YOU _KIDDING? _YOU JUST _BIT _ME!"

"Which is why you should lie down," he instructed. "You'll regret it in a minute if you don't."

"I'LL TELL YOU WHAT I REGRET," I yelled. Possibly I was hysterical. "I REGRET EVER COMING WITHIN A _MILE _OF THIS NUTHOUSE, I REGRET—"

The pain hit me like spring lightning. It came out of nowhere, bright hot pain that struck me right where he'd bitten me on the neck and then spread, lightninged out through my veins with my blood as a conductor. I felt my heart contract like someone was squeezing it, and I bent over double with my hands on my knees, breathless.

"What," I managed, once I could speak again, "was that? What is _wrong_ with me?"

"You should," Amun said, articulating each word perfectly, "lay down."

The second wave of pain proved him right, I _should _have laid down, because when it hit me again I lost all choice in the matter. All my muscles seized up with the sudden shock of pain and I went to my knees, screaming locked inside my throat with the rest of my muscles, because oh _God _it hurt, it hurt worse than anything I'd ever felt by far, worse than a broken jaw worse than second-degree sunburn. Worse than getting my hands cut off. It felt like acid burn, it felt like I'd swallowed snake venom or swallowed the whole snake, it was just _inside _of me and burning me out somehow, chewing me up like wildfire.

Before I knew it I was on the ground, curled up on my side like I was drunk or sick but I was neither, there was something _wrong _with me. Something that had to do with my neck where he'd bitten me, because no doubt that was the focus of it—that was where it hurt like someone was pouring gasoline into my wound and setting it on fire. My back was arching so hard that I felt I might snap my whole spine in half.

"Take him out of here," Lord Amun was saying to someone—I saw a vague blur of person behind me, but my eyes were acting strange, and I hadn't seen anyone come in but then again I had been distracted. "Put him in the west wing, you'll find restraints in the cabinet in the third room. You know what to do. And send someone in here to clean this up, would you?"

"Yes sir," said a voice I didn't recognize, and someone leaned down and picked me up.

The sudden motion hurt even more than just laying there, hurt like my skin cracking and peeling off, my bones cracking, and a throated cry escaped me as the man pulled me to his chest. My vision tunneled, then grayed, then blacked, and I'd never been more happy to lose consciousness and fall into nothing.


	4. Chapter 4

AUTHOR'S NOTE: For the sake of storyline, I'm going to mitigate the newborn-ness of Benjamin a little bit here. I'm still going to try to keep him as close to canon as possible, emotional, out of control, but I'm going to let him keep a lot of his personality. I just feel like we're barely getting to know him, right? Don't want to lose him now :). Also: thank you so much for the feedback. I love love you guys.

---

It was all blackness. I don't think I was unconscious anymore. It wasn't that calm, flat black of unconsciousness, it was a vivid, angry black, like being inside of a thing that's eaten you. I knew that if I was unconscious, I wouldn't be in this much pain.

I had no idea what the hell was happening to me.

This was the first time I could remember having real, coherent thoughts in—I don't know. Days. I remembered the pain, and I remembered—_crazy _things. I don't know. Crazy thoughts, wild ideas, _feeling _my body changing, distorting and hardening like death or chrysalis. I felt the moment when my hard stopped beating.

Eventually my vision came back into focus. It hardly mattered, because all I could see was the ceiling anyway—or maybe the rest of the room if I turned my head to the side. I didn't think of it. I was too busy dying.

I was sure that was what was happening. I couldn't think of any other ending from all this _pain, _surely this was too much pain for me to come out the other side alive. It was something to do with Lord Amun biting me, some kind of—reaction. Something had happened _because _he bit me, and it was killing me. But the pain kept going and I kept not dying, I kept being alive enough to see and scream, and surely if I'd died, it would have stopped hurting. I don't think I'd stolen enough things to go to Hell.

I almost didn't notice when the pain started going away. I had just gotten used to it—not that it wasn't bothering me anymore, far from it, but you can get used to anything. Your brain can trick you into thinking that it's normal so that you can try to deal. The pain didn't go away all at once—it sort of slid out of me gradually, dialing down one notch at a time.

I finally realized that I wasn't screaming anymore. That was what eventually tipped me off, because I _had _been screaming, I'd been screaming for days straight. I wasn't really much of a screamer. I'd never screamed when I'd broken bones, I wasn't afraid of heights or water or really much at all except for snakes, I guess, and I didn't scream about them. I was definitely more of a yeller—but when you were dying? When you were dying, you screamed. That was just what happened.

It struck me that it was very quiet in the room all of a sudden, and then it occurred to me it was because _I _was quiet. And then I realized that I was quiet because I wasn't in pain anymore. I wasn't in pain at all.

I immediately had this great idea that maybe I should sit up. I tried. I ran into heavy belted restraints a few inches up, the kind they use on dangerous prisoners or international spies. I tried to sit up again, but with no success, so instead I just laid back on the bed and kind of kicked my feet ineffectually.

"Hey," I yelled. My throat was raw and burning, the way it feels when you have strep throat or a bad cold. Only times a thousand. "Hey!" I was sure it was just from screaming so much, but there was something _weird _about the way my throat felt, heated and desert-dry. Anyway, it wasn't going to stop me from yelling. I was in a strange room, I was strapped to a bed, and for some reason I couldn't remember what had happened to me. Actually I couldn't remember anything at all. This was not going to work for me. "HEY!"

"Hey," someone cut in, sardonic, annoyed. "I'm right here. Shut up."

The voice was familiar, but—not familiar. If that made any sense. What I mean is that I knew I'd heard it before, because that voice was literally my only clear memory at the moment. He was the guy who had picked me up. After Lord Amun had bitten me and I'd fallen all the ground and all that, there had been that guy who'd picked me up and carried me to this room, and this was him. I remembered that voice.

I turned my head and saw him standing up from a chair in the corner, walking over to the side of my bed. "Um," I said. "Hey."

"Do you _know_ any other words?" he asked, the corner of his mouth pulling down. On first sight, my general impression of him was _brown_—leather and leathered skin, brown fingerless gloves, light brown hair that looked like it had been cut with kitchen shears. The kind of guy who looked like he was annoyed to be pulled away from riding horses and shooting outlaws, who wanted to get back to the important buisiness of striding through saloon doors. "I'm just glad you're _awake _now, I swear I've never seen anyone take this long."

"Who are you?" I asked. I had about seven hundred questions, and the problem was I couldn't ask them all at once. They were all shoved and stacked up against each other like clowns in a tiny car, and when I opened my mouth, this was the one that happened to pop out.

"Marek," he said shortly, and went to work on my restraints. "I'm letting you u now. You're not going to try anything."

"Hate to lose the element of surprise," I said, "but I think I probably am."

"No you're not," he countered firmly. "I already saw it and you're not going to try anything. Anyway, I would hope you're not that stupid."

"What do you mean you _saw—?_" The question got halfway out and then got shoved out of the way by another question, significantly more important than the minor quirks of obviously crazy people. "Listen, what _happened_ to me?"

He unbuckled the last restraint and I sat up slowly, carefully, with the vague idea that someone might try to stop me. Nobody stopped me, and I didn't make a break for it. Even though I normally would have. Really weird that he'd known that.

"What happened to you?" he repeated in same ironic tone, his voice permenantly lodged somewhere between boredom and sarcasm. "Well. Hmm. What's the best way to explain this? Benjamin, you seem to have gotten yourself killed."

Right. I'd thought of that one already, and it didn't make sense. "Sure," I said. "So this is heaven, is it? Stuck in some room with some random guy who doesn't ever give me a straight answer, can't remember anything, no idea what happened to me and _God, _my throat hurts! I'm _hungry!"_

I stopped, surprised. Where had that come from? What did my throat hurting have to do with me being hungry? When did I get so _weird?_

"I bet you are," he said dryly. "That's what I meant about being dead."

I threw my hands up in the air. "Look, you aren't making any sense. _Not_ that I'm surprised."

Marek sat down on the bed and crossed his arms, looking tired already after five minutes with me. "Let me make this as easy as I can," he said. "…You're a vampire."

I blinked at him. And thought this over. And blinked again. "I'm sorry?"

"You heard me."

"I really hope I misunderstood," I hissed. "I was hoping you'd said something else, because you have to understand that I thought I was _dying, _I don't know what the hell _happened _to me, and you're making jokes?"

"You can't die," he said matter-of-factly. "You're immortal. It's one of the perks, but I don't know. Still not really worth it. I guess you take what you can get."

"I'm _not _a _vampire! _That's _dumb!_"

Marek reached over to the nightstand, pulled open the drawer, grabbed a gun out of it and shot me in the chest.

I only had a chance to turn a little and close my eyes, and for the second time in recent memory, I was pretty positive I was dead. But I felt the bullet hit me and I felt it _bounce. _I opened my eyes in time to see it clatter to the marble floor, if not entirely flattened then at least a little bit…bent. It hadn't killed me. I wasn't dead. Well, unless I believed Marek—it which case, maybe I was anyway. I couldn't believe I was even considering it, but—I'd just had a bullet bounce off me, for God's sake.

"Believe me now?" he said, the gun still pointed at my chest in case I said no.

I stuck my finger through the hole that the bullet had made in my shirt, and was almost surprised when I touched my own skin. It was cold—alarmingly cold, cold like a corpse or a block of ice. I jerked my back quickly and stared at my own hand, as if it might be somehow be to blame. Nothing weird or disturbing going on there, except—it did seem to be a little—pale. I couldn't remember exactly, but I was pretty sure my skin had been a different color before.

"Still don't believe me, do you?" Marek said, and held up a mirror in front of my face, just another thing plucked out of the nightstand. I was starting to think he had a whole line of proofs stacked up in that drawer, waiting for me to finally cave under the weight of the evidence. Guns to shoot me and not kill me, mirrors to show me a reflection that made me actually jump backwards in alarm.

I knew _that _wasn't right. I might have had a shaky idea of how much darker my skin was supposed to be, or how much less stunningly attractive I was before this moment, but I _knew _that my eyes were not supposed to be bright red. I _knew _that.

Listen. Greek people believe in vampires. We have one of the oldest vampire mythologies in the world, and we've sustained it for a hell of a long time—I was still being threatened to listen to my mother or the vrykolakas would get me when I was in grade school, it was _in _us to believe. It's just that we don't _believe-_in-them believe in them. Not after we turn twelve.

Turns out that some beliefs shouldn't be grown out of.

"You people turned me into a _vampire_?" was my reaction. "Are you _kidding? _Son of a _bitch!_"

"_I _didn't do it," Marek pointed out. "Blame Lord Amun. Jeez."

"So I'm a vampire, huh?" I said, rolling with the insane momentum of this whole idea. "I'm a vampire? Great. Fabulous. What can I do?"

"Sorry?"

"What can I _do?_" I demanded. "I'm going to _assume _that drinking blood is a given, what else have I got here? You said something about perks—can I turn into a bat? Can I punch through walls? _What?_"

"You're supernaturally strong," he informed me. "You probably could have broken straight through those restraints if you'd known, there's not a lot you can't break right now. And you're pretty much indestructible, nothing will be able to—"

"Indestructible," I said. "Okay. Awesome. I'm out of here."

"What?"

"If I am super strong," I clarified. I was standing, testing my legs to see if they'd hold me, if they were strong, and they _felt _strong—they felt oddly perfect. "And I'm indestructible—then you can't stop me."

He didn't seem to be overly concerned with stopping me. "You shouldn't leave," was all the resistance he offered. "You're not in control. You have no idea what you've just become, and you can't control it. You don't know what you're getting into."

"I don't care," I said, finding my jacket on the bedpost and pulling it on. "I'm leaving."

"All right," he said. "Come find me when you figure out that you're a monster—that should be, what? Around the fifteenth person you kill?"

"I'm not going to kill anyone," I protested instantly, but the way my throat flared up as I said it, and the thoughts of blood that had started spontaneously occurring to me—they were connecting in ways I didn't want them to. I didn't want him to be right.

But most of all, I wanted to be _away _from the people who'd killed me. I was strong, and when it all came down it—I trusted myself. I trusted my own hands and feet and I trusted my own mind. There just wasn't anybody else—I'd never leaned on anyone else, and I damn sure wasn't going to start now. Stupid vampires.

"Right," he drawled. "Sure you're not. See you in a few hours, kid."


	5. Chapter 5

I killed a girl on the corner of Abydos and Minat, ten minutes after I left the complex. And honestly, I was surprised I even made it that long.

I started out just walking down the street like normal—it was night, it wasn't like a lot of people were out, and I hadn't been expecting to want to eat the people that were. The first time I walked past someone on the sidewalk, though, I knew I was going to have to change my plans. It was like walking past a giant hamburger on legs—no, it was way worse. It was like walking past a giant hamburger after eating nothing for two weeks, it was absolutely irresistible.

I'd never gotten into drugs or alcohol like some people I'd known—for one thing, it really just wasn't practical. Those kinds of habits cost money. Plus, I'd never really gotten a taste for addiction. I didn't like it, I didn't trust it, and I'd never been truly addicted to anything in my life. It was a new experience to have my body seize control of me and go _after _something.

I didn't kill that guy. I realized what I was doing and reined myself in at the last minute, changing direction sharply enough that I seriously freaked that guy out, but he was lucky he wasn't dead. I kind of waved to him as he walked quickly away, apologetically, _sorry for being a vampire, have a nice day. _

I wasn't even sure where I was going. I had a few places I normally hung out, places I went to sleep and to work, but I didn't want to go to those places. The way I was now, I was—dangerous. I was a time bomb, and I didn't want to be around anyone I knew when I exploded. You know, because of shrapnel and all that. Very dangerous.

I didn't know where I was going but mostly I just seemed to be walking fast in one direction, getting as far away from Lord Amun and weird Marek as I could, because they'd _done _something to me, and even if I didn't know entirely what it was yet, I knew that Lord Amun was the enemy. He was the kind of person you ran away from. I wondered how fast, exactly, I could run now. There was a desert to the west of here, the Libyan Desert. Deserts were maybe a good places for vampires.

I made it all the way to Minat Road before I snapped. It wasn't anything in particular, it was just about timing. It was like seeing how long you can hold your breath—you can maybe hold it for a long time, but not forever. Eventually, you _will _have to come up for air. So here's what happened: I was walking quickly down the street and there seemed to be no one around at all. That was why I'd taken this one, it wasn't a main street, and it was full of nice, normal people who would all be asleep at this hour. And they were. All except one of them.

I smelled the woman before I saw her—how creepy is that? I couldn't see her till she came around the corner, but she smelled human, that warm copper smell that almost sent me over the edge every time. She smelled amazing, and irresistible, like when someone pops buttered popcorn in the middle of the afternoon—you hadn't known you'd been wanting it but suddenly you could think of nothing else.

I thought about just making a break for it as she turned onto the street and started walking toward me, but the closer she got, the more I found that I just—couldn't. Honestly. I was screaming at myself in my head, yelling _walk away, you stupid Benjamin, what do you think you're doing? _But God I was hungry. I was so hungry and she smelled _so _good.

I felt that I was trapped in a very small corner of my own head, just watching my body as a furious observer while it went into power steering and took total control. I hadn't thought I had to worry about this, it wasn't like I knew _how _to kill somebody anyway, I was sure I would totally screw it up. Turned out that it was only Human Benjamin who didn't know how to kill people. Vampire Benjamin was actually really good at it.

The woman smiled at me a little as we got closer, enough to be friendly but not inviting anything. She certainly wasn't expecting me to snag her as she walked past and pull her against me and go for her throat. She started screaming, and I freed one hand to put over her mouth—not even because of secrecy, but because I didn't want to hear her scream. It was bad enough that I was biting her so that she bled and loving the taste of it. My new body loved it but I still had the memory of a gag reflex, still knew this was disgusting and wrong but God, the way it _tasted. _The heat of it. I never wanted anything else in my entire life. I didn't want love, I didn't want money and I didn't want my heart to beat again. I just wanted blood.

It was Jekyll and Hyde, like literally being another person. By the time I got control of myself, she was already dropping to the pavement and I was wiping my mouth off with my sleeve. Way, way too late. I went to my knees beside her anyway, checking her pulse as if there was something I could still do about it. No pulse. I could feel her blood inside of me, running through my burned-out veins. I hadn't left any for her.

"_Ben?_"

The voice rung a definite bell in me, but not in the way that Marek's voice had. This new, female voice belonged back before yesterday, in the fuzzy part of my life that was pre-death Benjamin. It wasn't exactly amnesia—more like being shortsighted. I knew it was all there, I just couldn't get it clear enough to see it. And I knew I should remember this girl.

"Benjamin?" she asked uncertainly. Yeah, this probably looked…bad. I rubbed my hands self-consciously on my jeans, as if I could make this all somehow less suspicious than me standing over a dead body, drenched in her blood.

She was small and very thin, with the thinness of a person who would much rather have enough food than a nice figure. Brown hair, pretty eyes—I think I used to be attracted to her. Possibly I would still be attracted to her if I wasn't currently a dangerous carnivorous monster. At the moment, though, I found myself a little more into the blood pumping just under her skin than I was into her big brown eyes.

"Is that _you?_" she said, stepping a little closer. I could see why she might be confused—I did look different than I had before, I knew that. Better. "Don't _look _at me like that, it's me, it's Ashai. What _happened?_"

Ashai. That did sound familiar. What was she _doing _here, and with such ridiculously bad timing? "You should get away from me," I said through my teeth, with the last ten seconds of self-control that I had.

"I'm sorry?" she asked, stepping closer. _Stupid _girl. Did she not _see _the blood on my arms? What part of the way I looked right now was saying come closer, give me a hug? "I didn't understand you, what did you say?"

"I said you should get away from me," I repeated.

"What?"

"Too late," I said, and grabbed her.

---

I was waiting for someone to find me.

I was sitting in the street with my back against the wall of a bead shop, the corpses of two women lying on the sidewalk on either side of me. I hadn't washed the blood off, I hadn't tried to hide them. I was sitting here waiting for someone to wake up, and walk past, and see me here and do something _about _me. I obviously wasn't capable of doing it myself.

It was probably two hours from sunrise when I finally heard footsteps. I didn't look up, I was too busy staring at my hands, where the blood was drying under the fingernails from red a horrible rust color. I didn't see anything till his feet came to a stop beside me. Brown boots.

"Hey, tiger," said Marek.

I looked slowly up at him. He was just standing there with his hands in his pockets, looking back down at me. "You're not going to say hi?" he asked.

I wasn't going to say hi.

Eventually he figured that out and kept talking. "Turns out Lord Amun isn't as into the whole make-your-own-mistakes thing as I am. I'm supposed to haul you back there. It looks to me like you're ready to go."

I said nothing, but I stood up, which was the closest I was going to come to saying yes. _Yes, _I was ready to go. I needed to stop _killing _people, I needed to find out how to control myself. I needed to take a _shower. _Pride wasn't in the picture anymore, and yeah. I knew he'd been right.

He was busy pulling the bodies into the alleyway, laying them out next to each other in the shadow from the wall. He told me that someone would come back for that later. He turned around and raised his eyebrows and jerked his head to the side, a clear let's-get-out-of-here. I couldn't agree more.

"Marek," I said, after we'd been walking awhile.

"Yeah?"

"Do you believe in hell?"

He stopped, and turned, and gave me a long look. Then he kept walking. "No," he said. "I don't."


	6. Chapter 6

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I am having the worst time trying to write a summary for this fic! Seriously, it's had like four summaries now and they're just getting progressively lamer. This story is a hard sell anyway, because Benjamin is an extremely peripheral character, so I need that kick-ass summary that I am…apparently totally incapable of writing :). If any of y'all have mad summarizing skills, please hook me up :). I need it!

---

"No way," I said.

Marek and I were standing outside Lord Amun's study, arguing about whether or not I had to go in. We'd been arguing for almost ten minutes straight now and getting nowhere, neither of us were the kind of person who backed down. The guards were trying to ignore us.

"You have to," Marek told me.

"I don't have to," I argued. "What is he going to do to me if I don't? It's not like he can _kill _me."

"Oh believe me," Marek said. "He can still kill you. It's just harder. Doesn't mean he can't do it. And it's not like it's a big deal, he just wants to talk to you."

"But I don't want to talk to him," I pointed out. "I think I hate him."

"It's really not in your best interest to hate him," Marek advised. "Because then there's a chance he'll decide to hate you back, and if he hates you he will kill you."

"I thought I was already dead."

"Yeah, well, you'll be the kind of dead where you don't get to walk around and make smart remarks about everything," he said severely. "Now I want you to get in there and _talk _to him."

"Or what?" I said stubbornly, crossing my arms.

"Or I will never, ever tell you how to control the bloodlust," he countered. "_Ever._"

"Oh," I said. "Damn." He had me there.

"So?" he said severely, nodded toward the door.

"Oh, all _right!_" I crabbed, and I yanked open the door and walked in. Marek followed me, which I had not expected. I thought he was throwing me to the sharks, but if he was then he was at least willing to get eaten with me.

Lord Amun was sitting in the same place I'd seen him last, in the same chair. I wouldn't think he had moved at all, except that the room around him had changed. There was now a large easel set up directly in front of us, diagonally to us so that it hid most of his face. He was _painting—_I couldn't see what, but I was sure it was something horrible.

"Marek," he said, not looking up from the painting. "The change was successful, I take it."

"Yes, sir." Marek had his eyes down and his hands clasped in front of him, the absolute model of respect, but there was a strange, screwed-up tension to the way he said 'sir'.

"No ill effects?"

"There appear to be none, my lord." There it was again, that _tension. _If I didn't know better, I would think that Marek really, really hated Lord Amun.

"Well," Amun said with satisfaction, as if he'd done something very clever. "Come here, boy, let me look at you."

I was really no good at being low class. I wasn't. I didn't have the knack for the bowing and the scraping and pretendingI was not worthy, not _equal. _I would do it all if I had to, if the consequences were bad enough otherwise, but I was always going to be grinding my teeth while I did. I walked forward a few steps and then stopped. It probably wasn't far enough, but if he wanted me closer then he would have to drag me.

He didn't have a problem with that. I'd made the mistake of putting myself actually within arm's reach of him, he didn't even _have _to use his cane this time. He simply reached out and caught my arm, and dragged me in, grabbing my chin and inspecting me with the cool scrutiny that I was starting to get used to.

"Hmm," he said. "Has he manifested yet?"

"By which you mean…" deadpanned Marek.

"Has he," Amun said slowly, patronizingly, "controlled any _fire?_"

"Oh, that," Marek said. "No. Not yet."

He looked me in the eyes for the first time, suddenly suspicious. "You're not holding out on me, are you, boy?"

"Weirdly enough, I _still _have no idea what you're talking about," I explained for the thousandth time. "You should be used to this by now."

Amun dropped me abruptly and his cane slid down into his hand, but before he could do anything Marek was grabbing me and jerking me backwards, putting himself between me and Amun.

"Now, do you really think that's necessary?" he said. "Kid hasn't done anything wrong, you don't need to hit him."

"He didn't—hit me," I said uncertainly.

"He was going to," Marek said shortly. "And it was uncalled for. He's expecting too much."

"I'm _expecting,_" Amun said icily, "compensation. If I thought he was just another worthless street rat, I wouldn't have _changed _him."

"Yeah, you really did me a favor there," I muttered, and Amun's eyes lasered onto me instantly.

"What did he say?"

Marek reached back, put a hand on my face, and shoved me backward. "Nothing, my lord. Absolutely nothing. I'm sorry that you're unhappy with his progress, but I promise you that we'll get straight to work on it."

Amun eyed us both, skeptical, mildly unhappy. "He's your responsibility, Marek. Take care of it."

Before I could say anything else, Marek grabbed me by my collar and hauled me bodily out of the room. "Will do!" he said briskly. "Thanks! Bye!"

"Would you stop _dragging _me places?" I yelled as we got out the door. "It's not like we're in a hurry! I mean, I do have _forever _now!"

"I really think the less time you spend with Lord Amun, the better," he said, letting go of my shirt. "At least until we work on your self-control."

"My self-control is fine," I said shiftily.

"Let me rephrase," he said. "We really need to teach you how to shut up."

I thought about this. "Fair enough," I said finally. "I think there's a couple other things I need to learn before that, though."

"Oh, you mean like controlling fire and not killing people and stuff," he said. "Yeah. We'll get to that later."

"What do you mean _later?_"

"I'm a little sick of you," he said with a quick, bright smile. "Believe it or not, I have things to do that do _not _involve you."

"Amun said that I'm your responsibility," I started to argue.

"I never planned to be irresponsible," he explained reasonably. "It's not like I'm going to let you run around causing trouble."

"Well then, what are you going to do with me?"

---

"Hey!" I yelled as the door slammed shut behind me. "You can't just _leave _me in here! Are you _kidding?_"

"No," Marek's voice came, muffled, from the other side of the door. That was it. Just _no._ Very understated sort of guy.

"I could just break the door down!" I threatened. "I can do that now!"

"Reinforced steel," he said back. "It's going to take you awhile, kiddo. But hey, go ahead. Knock yourself out."

"What kind of a person has a _reinforced steel door?_" I yelled, mostly just to make myself feel better. Because he was gone, I heard his footsteps disappearing down the hall, and there was no one to yell at anymore. Or at least that was my uninformed opinion, temporarily supported by me not bothering to turn around. "Son of a _bitch!_"

"Excuse me," said a voice behind me. "I'd appreciate it if you'd watch your language."

I turned to see a girl sitting on the bed, perfect posture, hands resting primly on her knees. Dark hair, dark eyes, and a light pink dress, looking like about my age. She didn't look surprised to see me, but then again she didn't _look _much of anything. Her face was like a six o'clock lake, beautiful and perfectly serene. Not a single ripple. I wondered how she'd gotten her hair so perfect in what basically amounted to a prison cell.

She wasn't a vampire, that was for sure. I could smell her from across the room, she was so human that I nearly lost it. What was Marek _thinking _putting me in a locked room with a human girl? Did he _want _me to kill her? Because that was definitely going to happen.

"Would I watch my language?" I said, struggling to stand still. "Was that the question?"

"I suppose it was," she said composedly.

"Then the answer is no," I snapped. "It's been kind of a rough day, okay, princess? I'm basically going to say what I want."

"Well, I want you to stop," she said, in the amiable, unbothered tone of someone who always gets their way. As if she expected that to be the end of it, right there.

"Did you hear me?" I said, taking a few quick steps forward before I could stop myself again, shuddering to a halt halfway across the room from her. "I don't _care. _I don't know why I got locked in here with you, but I'm guessing it wasn't so you could boss me around. Who do you think you are?"

"I thought you knew," she said disapprovingly.

"Knew what?"

"You called me princess," she said. "What, you're saying it was just a lucky guess?"

"Wait, you're…actually a—"

"A princess?" she asked serenely, as if she'd been waiting for a chance to say it all along. "As a matter of fact, I am. Princess Tia Safinaz Akilanna Shiva Kadin, daughter of King Farouk II. _Lovely _to meet you, I'm sure."

"Well, then I'm even more sorry."

"For what?" she asked with a delicately arched eyebrow.

"For killing you," I said. And then I grabbed her around the waist and pulled her to me and quite possibly committed treason. I don't think the laws were really clear about vampire murder—but they should have been.


	7. Chapter 7

Killing three girls in one day was a lot to own up to. I probably wouldn't have felt as bad if it were muscle-bound construction workers or middle-aged accountants, but it was just these _girls _with their gigantic, almond-shaped eyes and their glass-shattering screams. It really made it all that much worse, and I felt guiltier. It left no question about whether or not I was a monster.

When I bit into Tia's neck, she didn't scream. In fact, I could swear I felt her sigh against me, and she didn't move except to grab two handfuls of my shirt and hold herself steady. She wasn't struggling, wasn't fighting me, just standing there like she was waiting for something to happen.

At first when her blood hit my tongue, it was delicious, perfect, amazing. But then as it started hitting the back of my throat, after the first few seconds of tasting it, it was suddenly—something else. A dark sour taste that was suddenly coating my mouth, choking me—I jerked back from her like she was on fire, pushing her away hard enough that she fell back onto the bed, pressing her hand to her neck where it was bleeding.

I was gagging, spitting the blood out, stumbling back against the wall trying to get that _taste _out of my mouth. It was the worst thing I had ever tasted in my entire life, it was like biting into week-old roadkill. How could shetaste like that? She looked like she was made of lace and rose petals, she was a toothpick girl and she smelled like frosting. How could she possibly taste like that?

I asked her. "What the hell?" I demanded. "I mean seriously, what the _hell?_"

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said, very calmly for a person who's just been bitten. "Did that taste bad? Learned our lesson, have we?"

"What _are _you?" I wanted to know.

"I assure you I'm nothing more than human," she said, rubbing carefully at the dirty handprints I'd left on her dress. "God, would it hurt you to wash your hands once in awhile? This is never going to come out."

"You are _not _human," I accused. "You taste _terrible!_"

"That's so no one eats me," she explained. "I'm not stupid, I know what you all are. I suppose Lord Amun wanted to make sure I didn't get my blood drained out while I was still—_useful _to him_. _He just gave me these pills, and if I just take one every morning the worst I get is a neck injury."

"A _pill?_" I said skeptically. "What does it do?"

She shrugged gracefully, and I got the instant impression that she'd been dancing since she was a child. "Makes me taste bad, I assume," she said. "You tell me. He once told me that it was actually poisonous if you ingest too much of it."

"Poisonous?" I asked uneasily, rubbing my mouth with the back of my hand.

She looked me straight down her aristocratic button nose. "I wouldn't worry about it, spider. You didn't get enough in you."

"What did you call me?"

"Oh, sorry, would you rather me call you street rat? Guttersnipe? I thought spider was a little more ambiguous."

"Sweet of you," I said flatly. "I'm sorry you have to be _stuck _here with me, that must be really hard for you."

"Well, it's only been ten minutes," she said serenely. "I'll let you know."

---

When Marek finally came to get me, I practically jumped into his arms. Marek was weird and shuttered and intimidating, but he was _nothing _compared to Tia. Tia was driving me almost literally up the wall. I'd actually been going over the walls stone by stone at one point, with my hands, as if I might find some escape I'd been missing. I _needed _it, it was _not _going to work out with me and this girl. In the last two hours, she had: filed her nails, discussed the pros and cons of arranged marriages, advised me about how I should cut my hair, invented two verses and a chorus of a song about the sky, and reminded me not to touch her. Eight times.

"Oh, thank you," I said, zipping straight out of that room and slamming the door behind me. "I thought you were going to just leave me in there. What _took _you so long?"

"I told you," Marek said, eyebrows raised at my speed and desperation. "I had things to do—what is _wrong?_"

"You left me in there with _her._" I stabbed a finger back at the door. "She's _human!_ I could have killed her!"

"No you couldn't have," he countered. "She's poison."

"Oh, so you left me in there with a poisoned girl?" I adjusted immediately. "What if I'd killed myself?"

"I assumed you were smarter than that," he said. "Want to prove me wrong?"

"You know I can't controlmyself."

"I knew you wouldn't have to," he told me. "There was no way you were going to choke down enough of her blood to do any serious damage. I thought it would be a good lesson for you."

"I would_ love_ to hear the rationale for that."

"Well, obviously you need to learn that you can't go around biting every girl who walks across your path. Call it negative reinforcement. Why are you still standing here? Come on."

I hurried to catch up with him—he had those long, lean kind of legs that were just _made _for striding down long corridors. I couldn't hope to compete. "There has _got _to be an easier way to control myself."

"Of course there is," he said, not turning. "Want to know the secret?"

"Are you kidding?"

"You just have to hold your breath," he told me.

"Hold my breath?"

"All there is to it," he said. "The scent of potential prey is what triggers the hunger—if you hold your breath around humans, it dampens that a great deal. You may have noticed that you don't exactly need to breathe anymore."

"Really? That's all there is to it?"

"What, like it's hard to figure out?"

"I guess," I said, thinking about that a little more. Holding my breath, huh? I could do that. "Hey, where are we going, anyway?"

"I assume you want to get control over that other part of your life," he told me. "You know. The fire."

"Oh, that." It just kept coming back to haunt me, didn't it? I couldn't understand it. "Listen, Marek—I don't know how Lord Amun got that idea. I really can't—manipulate fire, or whatever the hell he thinks I can do. I don't know what he's expecting."

"Benjamin." It was the first time he'd said my name—I didn't even know that he knew it. "I think you'll find you're capable of more than you expect."

"If I could control _fire,_" I griped, "don't you think I would have noticed by now? I mean, wouldn't I have flame shooting out of my palms, or something?"

"Talents like that usually don't amount to much in a human," he explained to me. "That's why he wanted to change you, so that it would strengthen enough to be useful."

"So is that why he changed you?"

He looked sharply back at me, with an odd expression on his face—as if he hadn't expected me to catch on. "Yes," he said with a tight smile. "As a matter of fact, it is."

He stopped at a door and swung it open so hard that I had to jump back to avoid being hit. Marek was the kind of person who did that, did everything with violent energy and little thought to who might be in the way. I scrambled to get in the door after him.

It was a pretty normal room, a good size for maybe an office or a guest bedroom. The only thing strange about it was that there was—nothing in it. Literally nothing, no furniture, no carpets, no paintings on the walls. It was just a big marble box, six marble walls. It made me feel oddly claustrophobic.

He sat down in the middle of the floor and crossed his legs, looking perfectly comfortable at once, staring up at me expectantly while he waited for me to follow suit. Reluctantly, I sat down next to him, but I didn't cross my legs.

He pulled a box of matches out of his pocket and set them on the ground between us. "So," he said. "Based on what I've heard of your ability, it sounds like we're going to need to get you really upset or frightened."

"Wow, this is going to be _fun,_" I said, and settled in for a long afternoon of him throwing things at my head.

"I can't tell you how to access your ability," he said. "It's different for everyone. I can tell you, though, that it'll just be like a switch. Once you figure out how to do it, you'll never forget. It'll be some pressure point in your mind—you just have to figure out where it is."

Such helpful advice. "All right," I said, rolling up my sleeves. "Let's do this." I still wasn't convinced that there was any truth to this at all, but this was what was on the table for the next few hours, so might as well play along with it.

He lit a match and brought it slowly up in front of my face. I watched him carefully to make sure he wasn't going to throw it at me, but he was nicer than that. Very, very slightly nicer. "Try to move it," he said. "Try to change it. Find that place in your mind, Benjamin."

I stared at that match as hard as I possibly could, but my psychic abilities were probably being hindered by the fact that _this is so stupid _kept running through my head. "Marek…"

"That girl that you killed," he cut in, his voice low and constant. "You knew her, didn't you?" The match went out, and he picked another one out of the box and lit it.

"Yeah," I said. "I knew her."

"I saw it in the moment before you killed her," he told me. "I saw you talking to her. You knew her name."

"I knew her."

"She was a close friend, wasn't she? And you killed her. She trusted you, didn't she?"

"Please shut up."

"She just walked right up to you, she wasn't scared. She didn't know you were going to kill her, she never suspected. I hope she didn't have any plans for her life. What was she, seventeen?"

"Shut _up!_"

"You asked me if I believed in Hell," his voice kept pressing. "I told you no, but I _do _believe in Hell, Benjamin. Hell is real and you are going there. You don't have a soul anymore. You're a monster and you kill people who don't deserve to be killed."

"Shut UP!"

There was a loud _crack, _and I felt the ground moving under my feet. As I threw my head back and screamed the ground screamed as well, and a crack raced down the floor between us, cutting neatly between Marek and I and widening, cracking into an earthquake fissure.

We both stared at it blankly, not looking at each other. The match burned out in Marek's hand.

"Oops," I said.


	8. Chapter 8

"So what you're telling me," Lord Amun said, "is that he broke my guest bedroom."

Real answer: yes. The marble room had ended up splitting almost completely in half. If it had been a room standing by itself, it probably would have fallen apart, but as it was, it was just probably going to need…a couple thousand dollars in repairs. Marek was going to tell him the fake answer instead, the one that might not get us killed.

"I don't think any of us could have planned for that," he said carefully. "I had removed everything from the room, I left no chance that he could light something on fire. We were not aware that his talent extended to more than fire."

"But my guest bedroom remains broken," Lord Amun pointed out.

"I've got someone on it already," Marek promised.

"What are they using, superglue?" Lord Amun tended to speak like a snake striking—out-of-nowhere venomous, leaving you trying to patch yourself up after.

"It'll be fixed, sir," Marek maintained firmly. "I just thought you would want to be informed of what we discovered here."

"Of course I wanted to be informed," he said, and without warning his eyes locked onto me. He didn't usually look at me—almost never, in fact, not unless entirely necessary. "So, you can manipulate things other than fire, can you, boy?"

"I…guess," I said helplessly, then hurriedly added, "sir."

"Why did you not tell me this?"

"I didn't know," I insisted. "Really, I didn't. I didn't even know about the first thing. I'm really sorry that I broke your guest room."

"It's fine," he said impatiently. It hadn't been fine a minute ago, but he'd already moved on. "Anything else you're holding back? You're not going to be destroying anymore of my property, are you?"

"_No,_" I insisted. "And if you're really that worried about me destroying things, I would be happy to just….leave."

His eyes sliced down to slits, and I could see his grip tightening on his cane. That probably wasn't a good sign. "I hope that was a joke."

With the way he was looking me, I was suddenly tempted to say yes, but I was_ so_ terrible at lying—even if I needed to. "Um," I said. "No. I don't know why you're keeping me here, but I kind of…hate you."

Beside me, I saw Marek close his eyes and put his head in his hand. "_Do _you?"

_Say no, say no, _I told myself. _Say no! _"…Yes," I said.

"You want to leave?"

"Yes," I said with slightly more conviction this time.

"Where are you going to go?"

I opened my mouth to answer, but answering was made more difficult by the fact that he actually has a point. It took me a minute to come up with, "I don't know." Brilliant.

"You have no conception of what I've done for you here," he said coldly. "You have no idea the gift I've given you. You should be _thanking _me, you should be begging for the chance to live under my roof. I am offering you safety, boy, I'm offering you _security, _and power that you've never had the imagination to even think of. You have no idea of how dangerous it is for you now to walk outside my walls. I'll _protect _you."

"Hmm," I said. "No thanks. I still want to leave."

"You can't," Amun said, snapping a little. "You're mine, and I made you, and you're going to do what I say."

"Well," I said. "Okay then." Obviously, that wasn't something I was going to just buckle down and take, but I knew how to spot a losing battle. I was going to have to sneak around a little with this one, I wasn't stupid enough to take Amun head on. Not quite _that _stupid.

He was already eyeing me with dislike, irritated that I had dared to question him and that I wasn't falling-over-myself grateful for what he'd done. I mean, honestly, what did he want, a thank you card? I don't think Hallmark made cards for _hey, thanks for turning me into a vampire, immortality sure is fun! _Just a guess.

Before he could do me any serious bodily harm, though, all of our attention was suddenly taken by something else entirely. Crisis averted. Different crisis possibly on the horizon.

She floated into the room like she wasn't sure whether she was a ghost, white satin and loose curls. Dressed in a nightgown that I knew she didn't need, because from twenty feet away I could see the red of her eyes. And she was beautiful. She was one of those kinds of ghosts who lures you off a cliff to your death, and with only an outstretched hand and the swell of her body under the thin white dress. I didn't know whether to walk toward her or to run away.

Amun was out of his chair instantly and across the room, I'd never seen him move so fast. "Kebi, love," he said, taking her hands. "I thought you were in the garden."

"I was." Her voice seemed to barely come through your ears—it seemed to almost just show up on the inside of your head without bothering with your ears at all. It was light and porous, it was like fog; it seeped. "I was in the garden and all the flowers started screaming. They say we're going to eat them. They say the world is going to end."

"The world is just fine, darling," he assured her, smoothing her hair behind her ear. "There's nothing to worry about. I'm sorry your walk was spoiled."

"You should take care of them," she said seriously. "They're always screaming. It isn't right."

"I'll take care of them," he promised. "They won't bother you again." And instantly I knew that by morning, the flowers would be gone. Every flower in the compound—next time I walked outside, they would be gone. He would do this for her.

She'd gone silent, resting the point of her chin on his shoulder—but I couldn't help noticing that her eyes were right on me. She was looking over him at me, and eventually he noticed.

"Oh," he said with the slightest hint of distaste. "This is Benjamin, Kebi. He's new."

She left him at once, crossing the room toward me, and I quickly weighed the pros and cons of running away screaming. "Oh, he is _special,_" she said intently, catching my chin and looking me in the eyes the way that Amun always did. I wondered if this was where he'd gotten it. "Look how special he is, Amun."

"I've noticed," he said dryly, following less quickly behind her. "You should be careful, darling, we haven't yet taught him to behave."

"Oh, that's easy," she said airily, and jerked my face to the side so that I was staring right at her, right straight into her eyes. "Benjamin. You pay attention to my sun god. You will behave, and you will do what he says. If you don't, then I will find you, and I will put my hands all the way through your chest, and I'll find your soul and I will pull it out of you. I will eat your soul, I will eat it with my hands. You'll watch me eat it."

I slid Marek a frantic sideways look of _can she do that??, _and he sighed, and walked over to us.

"Thanks, Kebi," he said, gently extricating me from her grip. "I think he's got it. He'll be good."

Amun was there in an instant, ripping Marek away from Kebi, sending him stumbling ten feet away. Kebi, already detached from me, seemed to have forgotten entirely what she was doing and just floated where he'd put her, staring aimlessly off toward the door. "You _dare _put your hands on my wife?" Amun snarled.

"I'm sorry, I thought Benjamin was my _charge,_" Marek snapped back. "You said I was responsible for him, I guess I _assumed _that meant making sure no one ate his soul!"

"Marek, you forget yourself," Lord Amun said, no longer snarling, quieter.

"Maybe I have!" It was the first time I'd seen Marek lose control of _anything. _Even now it wasn't big, just him raising his voice for once, waving his arms. "Maybe I _have _forgotten myself, Amun!" That simmering hate surfacing for the first time, showing me the reality of what I'd been catching hints of. Marek _hated _Lord Amun, hated hated hated him and hoped he would die. Possibly hoped to kill him personally.

"Oh, have you?" Amun replied. The angrier and more animated Marek got, the quieter Amun was getting. The more in-control. "And have you forgotten Alice?"

I had never heard the name before. I would have ignored it and kept right on going with that conversation. But apparently everyone else knew something I didn't, because that name flash-froze the room the minute Amun said it. Angry Marek disappeared like magic—his mouth swung shut and his head went down and his shoulders collapsed, three-second instant transition back to Respectful Marek with not an ounce of fight in him.

"No, sir," he said, his voice barely audible.

"Well," Amun said with great satisfaction. "See that you don't."

"Wait a second," I said loudly. I did _not _understand what had just happened, and I didn't like it.

I never had a chance to say it, though, because the minute I opened my mouth, Marek grabbed me by the back of the collar like he always did and dragged me toward the door. Apparently he wasn't _that _changed.

But no way I was going to let this go. All he'd done by pulling me out of there was ensure that all my hundred questions were going to be directed straight at him. "So!" I said the moment we were out of that room. "Who's Alice?"


	9. Chapter 9

It was easy to tell when something was a touchy subject. People got that specific look on their face, like they might punch you if you didn't shut up. This was the look that Marek had right now.

I saw those pre-punching warning signs, but I wasn't backing off. I knew nothing about this guy, _nothing_—he was probably the closest thing I had to an ally in this place, but even he didn't seem to care about m. I didn't take it personally, because as far as I could tell, Marek didn't care about anything. At least not anything I could see. There was something driving Marek, but it wasn't anything here—he had all his focus on a point that I couldn't see, always staring straight over my head. He was distracted by something, and this was the first hint I had to what that thing might be. It was possibly worth getting punched.

"Who's Alice?" I pressed, even though he'd ignored me the first eight times. "He said 'Alice' and you looked like you'd been kicked in the head, Marek. Who's Alice?"

"Do you ever shut up?" he asked.

"I think you've known me for long enough to have the answer to _that _question," I replied. "I want to know who Alice is, Marek. I'm sick of being ten steps behind. I want you to tell me who she is."

"You want to know who she is?" he yelled—this seemed to be the button for a temper I wouldn't have guessed he had, this was the only way to make him yell. Just to say her name. "You want to know who she is?"

"Yes," I said uncertainly, blown back a little but his sudden onslaught.

"You want to know who she is?"

"Um," I said. "Yes." How many more times was he going to ask me?

"Alice is my daughter," he said, and the moment the words came out of his mouth, he seemed to deflate a little. Anger siding right out of him as he remembered what he was telling me. "She's my daughter."

"Oh," I said.

Wasn't expecting _that _one.

---

"She's in America," Marek said lifelessly, handing over a stack of photos that he pulled from a drawer his desk. It was a lot of pictures, maybe four or five full inches of pictures, and the ones at the bottom had white edges and dogears from years of handling. "In a prep school in Mississippi. She's the reason why I'm still here."

"I don't understand," I said, thumbing through the pictures. They showed a tiny, spike-haired girl so thin that you could see her bone joints. They weren't nice sit-down-in-a-studio pictures, they were pictures taken through bushes and from windows, creepy stalker pictures. The person who was taking them had never gotten close.

"Lord Amun," Marek said painfully, as if this were something he would rather not explain, "likes blackmail. He likes to have—definite _holds _over people, he likes to know that he has their loyalty. Why do you think Princess Tia is in that cell?"

"I don't know," I said. "If I met her, I'd probably want to lock her up too."

"Lord Amun has a lot of influence in the Egyptian government," Marek explained. "And Tia is the reason for that. He likes to be able to dictate things when he wants to, and what better way than to grab a minor princess and hold her hostage?"

"That makes sense," I said. "But I still don't understand what that has to do with your daughter."

"She's the hostage for me," Marek said shortly. "As long as I stay here and do everything that Amun wants me to, she's safe."

"Oh." That was low_. _I looked at the pictures of the skinny pixie girl and I felt a wave rush of offended anger—I mean seriously, that was just _low. _"Why don't you just go to Mississippi and get her? It looks like she's been there for awhile."

"Oh believe me," he said, shaking his head. "I've tried plenty of times. I just can't ever beat them there. My gift only lets me see a few seconds ahead, I can't ever anticipate where they're going to be. If I try it again, they _will _kill her, Amun has made that much clear."

I couldn't really find a way to tell him how sorry that was. I knew I couldn't exactly empathize, I had certainly never been through this kind of thing in my life. But I _felt _sorry for him, I felt _mad. _I felt like I wanted to charge right out and fix his problem. "That really sucks, man," was what I managed to get out. Brilliant. "I'm really sorry," I added, to try to fix my lameness. It didn't work.

The lameness seemed to hit him pretty hard, made him realize exactly who he was pouring his heart out to. "Yeah, well," he said, snatching the photos back. "It's been ten years. She probably doesn't even remember who I am."

"So," I said carefully. I wasn't sure how to express this next part, but I'd just had the idea and it was awesome. "It's probably safe to say that you hate him."

"Yes," he said emotionlessly. "I hate him."

"How…much, would you say, do you hate him?" I said, still tiptoeing.

He gave me a sharp look. "I'd say quite a bit."

"Enough to…say, want to kill him? For example?"

He sat up very straight, suddenly pulled out his melancholy by a new, strong suspicion. "You're not trying to hustle me, are you, Benjamin?"

Damn. Caught. "No," I said immediately, putting my hands up. "No, no hustling. It was just occurring me that we seem to have some similar interests."

"What, killing Amun?" he said sardonically, snapped fully back into cowboy Marek mode. "Yeah, that's going to work out really well."

"I'm not saying we should sneak into the study in the dead of the night and kill him or whatever," I said, frustrated. "I'm just saying we should _think _about it. We've got some definite resources between us, we can do some incredible things—"

"All you can do is snuff out a candle, sparky," he reminded me. "Hate to break it to you, but Amun's not exactly a marble wall."

"We'll work it out," I maintained. "I'll learn how to control it, who _knows _what I can do."

"Right," he said. "Okay. I've had about enough of you for today."

"You can't just blow me off," I told him. "I'm here right now because I _want _to be, I could walk out that door right now and you know it. I don't have anyone held hostage for _me, _I could walk out of here!"

"Go ahead," he said blackly, waving a hand toward the door. "Try it. If you're really determined to learn the hard way, then go ahead and _try _it. "

"Maybe I will," I snapped back, a little derailed by his agreement.

"You don't understand that this is the rest of your life," he said tiredly.

"I understand," I let him know. "I just disagree."

He looked at me despairingly for a couple of minutes, arms folded, how could he look so tired when he never had to sleep? He looked at me like he wished he had something more to say. "Benjamin," he said finally. "Go to your room."

---

Tia was giving me that polite smile that they taught princesses for dealing with the lower class. I had seen annoyance and distaste flash temporarily over her pretty face when she first saw me coming back into the room, but she was a professional. It had taken her only seconds to resume a smooth, pleasant, politically correct expression instead.

"Hello, Benjamin," she said formally. "Nice to see you again."

"So you're a hostage," I said to Tia. I sort of felt the need to provoke her all the time—to poke holes in her inflated princess persona.

She didn't bite. "As a matter of fact, I am," she said loftily. "It's a perfectly respectable thing for a lady to be."

"Right, that sounds like a _lot _of fun," I said. "I guess it's not like you were doing anything important."

"Princesses are very important!" There we go, I'd offended her. It was a start. "We have many important…responsibilities, and duties, we have to make _appearances—_"

"Yeah, appearances, that's about what it comes down to, isn't it?" I said, walking across the room to the small barred window, putting my hands on the bars and testing them experimentally.

"Benjamin, you are a perfectly horrible boy," she informed me. "I never want to talk to you again."

"I feel pretty okay about that," I said amiably. "Hey, what do you think these bars are made out of? Steel?" She didn't say anything, and I turned around to make sure she was still there. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, staring in the other direction, her mouth pursed like it had a drawstring. "Oh, I forgot, you're not talking to me."

She still didn't reply, which was impressive—I hadn't thought she could actually do it. I shrugged and pulled a little harder on the bars, feeling them start to move in their cement bed. Honestly, what was the point of having a reinforced steel door if you were going to have this embarrassingly weak barred window on the other side of the room? Then again, I don't think this room was made to keep vampires in. I don't know if there were any rooms like that.

I braced my feet on the floor, locked my elbows, and pulled back on the bars as hard as I could. They bent a little—sometimes it was hard for me to conceive of how strong I was now, bending metal _bars. _Goodness gracious. But the bars didn't come out, they just bent inward, and that wasn't going to help me. The cement was the problem.

_Well, come on, Wonder Boy, _I told myself, remembering the crack running through the marble floor. _Let's do this. _

I gave those bars another try—nothing.

"Hey, Princess," I called over my shoulder. "Insult me."

"What?" Well, there went her not talking to me.

"Insult me," I said again. "Seriously. It's important."

"Why should I even _bother?_" she said, looking down her nose. "You're _nothing. _You are worthless, and you will never matter to anybody. Go die in a fire."

I pulled those bars right out of their sockets.

"Thanks," I said dryly, holding the two bars away from me. "I really liked the part where I'm dying in a fire."

"Just trying to help," she said airily. "Also, I forgot to ask you exactly what you're doing."

"What does it look like I'm doing?" I said crossly. "I'm escaping."

"Oh," she said, and promptly stood up on her bed, walking over to the gap in the window.

"What do you think you're doing?" I demanded as she pushed her way in front of me and put one foot up onto the windowsill.

"I'm coming with you," she said, in that tone of voice that said it was meant to be obvious.

"You are _not,_" I said, putting my hands on her ridiculously tiny waist and pulling her back down.

"Yes I _am,_" she said, kicking me in the shins. Completely ineffective, but I'm sure it made her feel better. "Or do you want to be responsible for Lord Amun acting as the calloused, heartless puppetmaster of the government of Egypt?"

Well. When she put it that way.

I put my hand out and helped her step up to the window.

---

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I've kept the time period of this fic purposefully ambiguous because of a big inconsistency—Alice's birth date. So basically…I'm asking you guys to ignore it :). Just pretend with me! It will be fun.


	10. Chapter 10

"What are you _doing?_"

Tia was watching me twitch my way down the street like a basket case, biting my lip every time we passed a human. It had been what—six hours since I'd eaten? I didn't know what the normal time period was for this kind of thing, but I knew that I was _hungry. _I was using the holding-my-breath trick, and that did help a lot, but I still remembered what it was like to bite into them. Yes, bite into them. Like I thought of them as apples now. I was creepy.

"Nothing," I muttered. "I'm hungry."

"Ugh_,_" she said distastefully. "Of course you are."

"Listen, it's not like I can control it, okay, princess?" I said, as she pulled me away from a passing group of people as if she thought I might jump in and savage them all. It was annoying because it was true. "You're lucky you don't have to worry about it."

"I am lucky," she said breezily. "And you're going the wrong way. The palace is way over there."

"Well, I'm not going to the palace, am I?" I said to her. "I might get smudge marks on it."

"Then why are you still walking with me?" she asked reasonably.

It was a good question. I didn't have an answer to it. "You look ridiculous," I informed her instead.

"I look fantastic," she argued.

"That's the problem." I wasn't going to argue that she didn't look good. She did. Tia was extremely pretty, and sometimes I even noticed. "Nobody walks around looking like you."

"Thank you," she said primly, and kept walking.

I chased after her. "That _wasn't _a compliment."

"Yes it was."

"Listen, I'll just _get _you to the palace, and you'll have this great Kodak reunion scene, and I'll be out," I said, which was the closest I'd come so far to explaining. "That's all this is."

"You mean you're _escorting _me?" She, of course, was not willing to let it go.

"I'm…making sure you don't get yourself killed," I dodged.

"Do I need to get you a dictionary?" she asked. "That's escorting, spider."

"Okay, so I'm escorting you!" I threw my hands up in the air. "Big deal! Do you want me to stop?"

"Yes," she said.

"Oh," I said, blinking. "Well, I'm not going to."

She sighed. Loudly. "You're in love with me, aren't you?"

I fell off the sidewalk, knocked over two recycling bins, and almost got run over by a car. The driver honked at me and made an angry hand gesture that I'd never seen before in my life. I would have to remember that one. "I am NOT in love with you!" I yelled, as soon as I'd managed to get upright again.

Tia had kept walking, she was halfway down the block by now. She was surprising fast in heels. "If you weren't in love with me, you would have stopped following me," she said, not turning to look at me. Still walking, and again I was left to run after her. "If you _really _disliked me that much, you wouldn't talk to me. You wouldn't argue with me, you would just leave me alone. Hey, look, the sun's about to come up."

"What does that have to do with _anything?_"

"What, you don't _know?_" She had a way of saying things, a specific tone that made you feel about the size of a beetle. They probably taught it to you at princess school. "You _are _a newbie, aren't you?"

I was about to ask her _know what?_ She wouldn't hold out on me, not if she saw it was really important, and she would have eventually told me. She couldn't do that, though, because at that moment someone grabbed me, spun me, and slammed me against a wall.

It happened because I was surprised. He didn't feel strong, he didn't smell like a vampire, he couldn't have done it if I had offered any resistance at all. But I was surprised, and it happened, and I was looking into the angry triangle eyes of Suliman. He thought that he had just caught me, and for ten seconds, I let him think that.

"Hi," he said nastily, smiling with temporary triumph. "I've been looking for you."

I had been wanting for so long to do exactly what I did next—to smile at him, and grab him, and throw him thirty feet into a bike rack.

"_Benjamin!_" Tia was horrified. Suliman was sprawled over the bikes with his arm through the spokes of a bike wheel. Possibly one of the spokes was now _through _his arm, I couldn't tell from here. Not exactly a ladylike scenario.

"Yeah!" I said. Good thing it was early and nobody was out. Because I'd just done something crazy. "Hang on! I've got something to take care of here!"

"What—the hell—" Suliman was struggling upright, now aware that something had seriously changed since we'd last met. I would be lying if I said I didn't love that. "_Are _you?"

"Don't worry about it," I said, but as I walked toward him my eyes were definitely getting caught on his blood. It looked _great—_it looked slick and pretty red, funny how blood could seem so appealing to me now. It was my favorite thing.

So I bit him. I did. It was probably not an okay thing to do, but I did it. I couldn't seem to rationalize this, ever, I couldn't seem to get rid of the idea that what I was doing was wrong. Because it was. No one had ever tried to tell me that it wasn't, come to think of it, we weren't kidding ourselves. It was just that even though I couldn't help it, there was that flash of guilt right as I bent over him. The last frantic yell of the shoulder-angel before I got that blood into me.

It didn't occur to me that Tia was standing there watching me and that she was going to hate me now. Assuming she didn't already.

"Benjamin!" It hadn't stopped me the first time Tia had yelled at me, and it didn't stop me this time. But it made me look up a little, just enough to get a look at my own skin.

It was—there was no other word for it—_glittering. _My first reaction to this was complete and utter horror—I was a _boy, _I didn't need _glitter _on me. I yelled and jumped up, brushing my skin frantically as if I could get it off. It didn't come off. It wasn't on me, it was _in _me, I was prisming like a crystal cave.

"TIA!" I yelled. "I'M SPARKLING!"

"I _told _you!" she yelled back from across the street.

"_There _you are!" I had mixed feelings about Marek, but they were _strong _mixed feelings. I was never ambiguous about him. Whenever I heard his voice, I was either thrilled or I was really mad. This time I was thrilled, because Marek was way good at explaining stuff, and I needed some stuff _explained. _

"Marek!" I said, running over instantly to where he'd just appeared at the end of the street, by the carpeting store, leaving Suliman bleeding on the bikes. Suddenly I wasn't feeling that hungry. "Marek! I'm _glittering!_" I held my arm out two inches in front of his face so that he could see.

"Don't think you're so special," Marek drawled, and put his own arm up next to mine. He was glittering too.

This was a good sign. It meant that I wasn't some sort of freak. Well, okay, probably I was still _some _sort of freak, but at least I wasn't the only freak. That was the important thing. "Oh." Slightly calmer now. Still on the hysterical side. "So this is some kind of…vampire thing."

"That's right," Marek explained patiently. Another good thing about Marek was his patience. After all, he had to deal with me. "It's a vampire thing."

"What the hell?" I said crossly, still rubbing at my arms. "I thought we were supposed to be _scary._"

"What, rhinestone skin isn't your idea of bump in the night?" he said sardonically, and started walking quickly off down the street. "Thanks for distracting me, she's gone and run off."

"Who, you mean Tia?" I asked, feeling a sudden stab of worry. I was supposed to be her escort, after all. "What do you need her for?"

"What did you think, Ben, that I just missed you and dropped in to say hi?" He turned sharply into an alleyway, and it was obvious why, she was leaving human scent like a neon arrow trail. "I was sent to come get you. Both of you."

"You could just get me," I suggested helpfully. "You really don't need to bring _both _of us back. Amun will understand."

He gave me a weird look, but didn't bother responding to my blatant lie. "I see you had another slipup. We'll have to take care of the body before we go."

"I don't know if he's…all the way dead," I said guiltily, as we ran into a dead end. "I kind of got—startled. Oh look, Tia's not here, we'd better go."

Marek walked straight over to a pile of empty boxes and kicked them aside with one foot, revealing Tia crouching behind them, who scowled at being discovered and immediately tried to run away. Marek caught her by the back of her dress and pulled her back, much more gently than he usually did with me. Favoritism. Possibly sexism.

"You let me _go,_" she spat, swinging at him with her fists and missing by a good six inches every time. His arms were longer than hers. "_Let me go! _I am a Princess of Egypt!"

"That's the problem," he said sardonically. "Sorry, Tia. Nothing personal."

"Hey," I said, surprising myself by suddenly getting in on the action. "Let her go."

"Um," he said blankly, pausing for a second to look at me. "No."

Tia took another swing at him, which he ducked easily, which in turn made her really furious. I sympathized. It wasn't fun to be totally ineffective. "Let me _go!_"

"Let her _go!_" I echoed, walking toward him in what I hoped was a threatening manner.

"_No._" he said firmly, starting to get frustrated.

"_Yes!" _I yelled back. "You don't _need _her, Marek, you're not Amun, you can let her go! It'll be easy!"

"Seriously, Ben, why do you _care?_"

"Because I love her!" I yelled.

Oh. Damn. I really hadn't…expected to say that. I hadn't known it was anywhere in me at all. This was really strange, and…really embarrassing. I was trying to avoid looking at the expressions on their faces. Especially hers.

"I didn't mean that," I said. "That was…a lie. I didn't mean…um." I looked up just out of curiosity, and she looked just like I thought she might, shocked and very slightly amused, one eyebrow arching. "…Son of a bitch."


	11. Chapter 11

"So," I said to Marek. "I've rethought my position on learning how to shut up."

"Oh, no," Marek said airily. "Don't worry, I've decided it's funny. Please don't stop."

"Oh yeah, it's funny," I said crossly. "Hilarious. Remember the part where I declared my love to Tia?"

"Yeah, that's kind of what I meant."

Tia's mood had changed completely. The instant the whole ill-advised I-love-you incident had occured, she'd gone from spitting wildcat to practically whistling. I should have known she was that kind of girl. Still, I thought she might make a break for it once we got to the gates, but she didn't—just waited docilely for them to open, hands clasped in front of her.

I had to say, it was weird to be actually going through the gates like a normal person, instead of, you know…climbing.

"You should have let her go," I said, but my motives had certainly changed on that one. Now it was more _you should have let her go because then I wouldn't have to look her in the eye ever again. _Why the hell had I said it? _Why _had I said I loved her, because I was pretty sure it wasn't true. Not entirely sure, since I didn't technically know the difference. But why the hell would I fall in love with _her?_ That didn't make any sense at all.

"Sorry," Marek said, not sounding all that terribly sorry at all. "You're both pretty hot commodities at the moment."

"But not to you," I reminded him. "You know you want to let us go." I was just short of _everybody's doing it! _And I would have used that one too if I thought it might work.

"Benjamin," Tia said as the gate swung open for us, in an innocent voice that put me instantly on my guard. "Benjamin, come help me up the steps."

"No!" I yelled back. Didn't matter if I loved her or not—I was going to try my best to hate her anyway.

"But _Benjamin, _my _feet _hurt," she said, batting her eyes at me. I knew what this was. This was the part where she tested me—she was trying to see how far that love thing went, what she could get out of me. How much of a hold she had over me.

"Maybe you should have thought of that before you wore four-inch heels to a prison break, princess!" I said, refusing to budge an inch.

"If you loved me, you would help me up the stairs!" she yelled.

"Well, maybe I don't love you," I said, stalking up the stairs to meet her. This was what I wanted to establish, this was what I wanted her to believe. I would repeat it over and over until she believed it, or I believed it, or both.

"You _do _love me," she said, catching my sleeve as I walked past. "I knew it even before you said it. You should _see _the way you look at me, Ben, I can _always _tell."

"Hush, dear," I said. "Time to shut up now."

"You might as well just admit it!" Her voice was getting louder with every word, spiraling up. "It'll make it all easier, I don't _mind. _You can love me all you want, I won't stop you!"

"What—" I tripped over the next step.

Vampires were graceful. Vampires were coordinated, vampires never missed a beat. Vampires never tripped over stairs, but here I was. Falling sideways and catching onto her for balance, grabbing her arm until I realized what I was doing. Dropping her like she'd burned me.

"It must be love," she said, suddenly quieting, dropping back down to normal. "Because you feel so stupid."

I opened my mouth to respond to that, it was my turn in our vocal tennis match—but she'd stopped me. She was so silly and so full of fluff, but then every once in awhile she would say something that was—right.

I hated that I couldn't dismiss her. I _wanted _to dismiss her.

"Close your mouth, kiddo," Marek said as he walked past. He didn't seem all that concerned with watching us anymore, keeping us in line. We were a little too wrapped up in ourselves to be thinking of any escape attempts at the moment. "If you want her, take her. She'll never respect you if you keep chasing after her like this."

"Okay," I said, feeling very confused and disoriented, and very put-upon. Why was this happening to me _now? _"Thanks. I'll—keep that in mind."

"Hey Ben," he said, sharp warning voice.

"What?"

"Too late," he said, and when I turned back around Kebi was literally two inches in front of my face. I stifled a yell.

"Blow," she said, and she held up a dandelion in front of me. It was a late-summer dandelion, puffed out to explosive white seeds, completely normal but suddenly looking alien when shoved this close.

"Sorry?" I choked out, still trying to recover from the shock. Good thing it wasn't possible for me to have a heart attack.

"_Blow,_" she said insistently, pushing the dandelion closer. At least it wasn't hard to figure out. I sucked in my breath to blow the seeds away—it seemed to always be the best idea to just humor her—but her other hand snaked in and covered my mouth. "Not with your mouth."

Good Lord, who had let her _out? _She should have been in a mental institution, not out wandering around where she could startle people and harass them about dandelions. "Well, what's my other option?" I demanded, pulling her hand away.

"Blow it out with your head," she said impatiently, and wrapped the hand over the side of my face, over my temple, like an octopus that had attached itself there. "Blow it out with your brain, spider."

"What—why did you…call me that—" I spluttered, derailed.

"Blow. It. Out," she said sternly, as if speaking to a dog or a disobedient child.

I stared uncertainly at then over at Marek, then back to the dandelion. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him shrug. "You should try," he said. "There is a reason she's like this, Ben."

So I sighed and reached back into my mind, searching for access to my freakishness, trying to clear my thoughts as much as I could with her bloody-ruby eyes staring straight into me. Blow it out with my _brain? _I reached experimentally for the closest gust of wind, and to my surprise I got a grip on it, cupping it in imaginary hands like a caught firefly.

Impressive. And I wasn't even angry—just a little freaked out.

I dragged the trapped breeze over with me to the dandelion, and then released it, letting it sweep off in Kebi's direction. She laughed when it ruffled through her hair and dress—my aim hadn't been fantastic—but the edge of it caught the dandelion, blowing the seeds out into a million pieces. A few of them caught in her hair and stuck there, bright white against the black of it.

"Very good," she said, patting me on the top of my head. "Very very good."

"Air," I said, half to myself. "I can move _air? _I didn't know that." I was awesome. What else could I do, move mountains? Learn to fly?

"Well," said Tia loudly. I'd almost forgotten she was there—Kebi demanded a lot of attention, which was what she was probably objecting to. "_That _was productive. Shall we move on?"

Kebi was already drifting away, whim accomplished, off to find somebody else to direct her weirdness at. She stopped only once. "Oh," she said, as if she'd just remembered it. "Tall man. Your daughter's in danger."

Marek reacted as if he'd been electrocuted, his spine snapping straight, his frame lunging forward. "Alice? She's in danger? Danger from who?"

"Amun," Kebi said, unusually direct. "And possibly paper cranes. Alligators. Loud yelling. Sleet…"

She floated slowly back up the last three steps as she spoke, and after awhile we couldn't hear her listing things. She was still speaking, but she didn't look back at us as she disappeared in through the door.


	12. Chapter 12

"Benjamin, go away!" Marek said.

"No," I said. "Tia, go away."

"No," she said. "If you get to be here, I get to be here."

"_Neither _of you get to be here!" Marek insisted. "I should have locked you back in your room."

"You can't lock me in there," I pointed out. "I'm getting really good at this stuff. I'll probably set you on fire or something."

"And if he gets to come, then I definitely get to," Tia reasoned. "I'm way less dangerous than he is."

"You're also in way more _danger _than I could ever be," I pointed out. "Stupid human."

"Oh, I'm _so _sorry that I'm not a bloodsucking creature of the night," she said archly. "I guess that means I can't be in your club."

"Tia, go away_,_" I said. "We're about to confront Lord Amun, and he hates us anyway, and is probably mad at me for running off, it's _not _going to be a safe environment for someone like you. Go _away._"

"Make me," she said, drawing down her mouth and her eyebrows, actually managing to look intimidating despite her size.

I have no explanation for what I did next. It was just one of those leap-before-you-look moments, a logical extension of everything that had happened last night. I just wanted her to leave and be safe, and somehow that translated to me leaning toward her and catching the back of her neck and kissing her on the mouth.

I felt her gasp against me as I kissed her, but she didn't pull away—her arms had gone rigid at her sides, not touching me, but she didn't pull away. After a few seconds, it occurred to me what, exactly, I was doing—and I froze. And opened my eyes. And pulled very carefully away.

She looked up at me from half-lidded eyes, and slowly, slowly smiled. Like she was drugged or entranced, something slowing her reactions. And then she reacted.

The slow smile broke into a sparkling, forty-tooth grin, smiling looking me straight in the eye. "Well, I guess I'll go back to my room now," she said airily, and turned on her heel to leave.

"Jeez," Marek said. "Should have done that ten minutes ago."

"I don't think it would have worked as well if it was you," I said blithely.

"No—of course I didn't mean—oh shut up," he said, frustrated, and knocked on Lord Amun's door.

There was no answer. Also there were no guards outside the door, which was why we'd been allowed to stand here this long. I didn't hear anything inside the study, but I'd never seen Amun anywhere _except_ the study. I was pretty sure he only existed in the study. "Maybe he's not there?" I suggested, after a few solid minutes of waiting.

"He's there," Marek said grimly. "I can smell him." He knocked again, harder. When there was still no answer, he took two steps back, looked the door up and down, and then walked forward again and put his foot through it.

Clearly this was not one of those reinforced steel kinds of doors. In fact, now that I looked at it, it seemed to be a sort of expensive mahogany, so I had to assume Amun would be pissed about Marek kicking it in. Hey, his fault he couldn't be bothered to answer the door.

"Wow," I said, impressed. "Lord Amun is going to kill us."

"No he won't," Marek assured me. "At least—not in the next few seconds." He reached carefully through the gaping hole, found the doorknob on the other side, and unlocked it with ease. Possibly he'd done this before. "Go ahead," he said, gesturing inside the room as the door swung open.

"You first," I said firmly. You could hardly ever see in Lord Amun's study. He kept it dark, like a cave. No way I walking in there all by myself, I might be ambushed by mercenaries or trip-wire explosives or something.

"You broke my door," came Lord Amun's voice as Marek walked in. He was really good at after-the-fact statements like that.

"You should have answered it," Marek replied evenly.

"I suppose it's your prerogative to antagonize me all you want," Amun mused, "but do you really think it's wise?"

As I followed behind Marek, I began to see other shapes in the dark room—people shapes, _big, _guard-shaped shadows and a _lot _of them. Well at least now we knew where the guards had been—staff meeting, maybe? Potluck? I didn't know. I wished there was a fire in the fireplace—that would have made me feel a little less worried about being killed.

"Why?" Marek said aggressively. "Why shouldn't I antagonize you? Are you going to tell me to think of _Alice?_"

"Something along those lines, yes," he said dryly. "Am I to take it that you no longer care about your daughter?"

"I care if you go back on our agreement," Marek pressed. The guards shifted uncomfortably, wondering if perhaps they should intervene, but they were the sort of men who didn't move till they were told. If _I _were an evil vampire lord, I would have guards who were a little more proactive. That was what I would do. "I care if you hurt her."

"I'm not going to _hurt _her," Amun said patronizingly. I was just starting to make out the bones of his face, the red flash of his eyes. My night vision was better than it used to be as a human.

"I would love to hear your definition of that," Marek said tightly.

"Oh dear, it seems the cat's out of the bag," he said dryly, flipping his cane over once in his hand, one quick eye-catching motion that brought it flat to his palms. "Marek, I'm sorry, but the situation with your daughter has changed."

"How has it changed?" he growlied.

"Your daughter," Amun said slowly, turning the cane over in his hands, "seems to have manifested some rather interesting abilities."

"Abilities," he repeated stiffly.

"Indeed. Rather a better version of her father, if my reports are not mistaken. It seems that she's capable of channeling full-fledged predictive visions. When she becomes a vampire, I cannot even imagine what she might be able to do."

"You are _not _turning her!" Marek snapped. "You're _not. _You touch her and I will never obey another order, I will never do a single thing for you again, Amun. She is _all _you've got on me."

"Well, now that I have _her_," Amun drawled. "I certainly don't need _you_."

It took a moment for that to really hit Marek—I could almost see it seeping in through his pores, the realization hitting his bloodstream of exactly what Amun was saying. I saw the moment that it hit him, and it wasn't difficult to tell—because a snarl ripped out of him and he leapt for Amun's throat.

I made a belated grab for him, trying to stop him from doing something stupid—I think that was why I'd come, but if it was, then I'd failed, because he got only about three feet before the guards were on him, closing in from all sides.

One on one, they were no match for Marek. I watched him dance around the first two guards who reached him, ducking neatly under their swings like he'd known where they would be. Because of course, he had known. Hard to fight a guy who knows exactly what you're going to do next.

Eventually, though, the sheer number of them got to be too much for him, got to the point where even knowing where the blows would land was not enough to stop all of them. I saw him start to disappear behind the mass of uniforms and muscles, still struggling toward Amun, who was sitting in his chair, watching without the slightest bit of concern. He wasn't going to make it.

There wasn't a fire in the grate, and there wasn't a lot of air or earth in this room, but I'd lived seventeen years without falling back on that kind of thing. I shrugged, closed my hands into fists, and waded into the middle of the fight.

---

We lost.

I guess that was kind of a foregone conclusion, but never let it be said that I'm a fair-weather friend. No, I am at _least _as stupid enough as the person who's just gotten themselves into a scrape, and I'm always willing to jump on a sinking ship. My excuse after was always that I didn't know for _sure _that it was going to sink. There was always a chance! And there were lifeboats, and things.

I didn't know what had happened to Marek. I had to hope he was still alive, if only because it was really, really hard to kill a vampire, and I hadn't heard any limb-rending going on. I would have heard that kind of thing, right? So he was probably alive. Most likely, he had just been bundled off to a cell the way that I had been, defeated and immobilized and then locked behind a reinforced steel door.

I don't know if they were trying to kill me, or what, because they locked me back in with Tia.

Walking around in Cairo with Tia was one thing, but being boxed up in a tiny cell with Tia? That was something else entirely. How was I supposed to explain all the weirdness from the last twenty-four hours? What would she expect?

It turned out that it wasn't as complicated as all that.

"Listen, Tia," I said uncomfortably, looking over at her, sitting on the bed. She always seemed to be sitting on the bed, but I guess there wasn't a lot of other options. It was a small room. "I want to apologize for everything that's been going on today. I really don't know what came over me, must have been some kind of weird hormonal imbalance, or—"

"Shut up," she said impatiently. "Come here and kiss me."

I felt a grin break over my face. "Finally!" I said, throwing my hands up. "Something I _want _to do!"


	13. Chapter 13

We spent the whole next weekend making out. I'm not really ashamed to say that—I was still a teenage boy, after all, even if I was a vampire. It was surprising, but the way we fell right into each other—it was perfect and right, it was exactly the order of things. We kind of hated each other still, and we fought like cats and dogs, but it didn't matter. Every time it got too angry, every time we were boiling over, screaming at each other, about to tear each others' heads off, we always ended up touching each other or suddenly meeting glances, and that was just it. We were attached at the mouth again, rolling over each other on the bed, hands tangled in each others' hair.

We alternated between giggling and yelling, kissing, fighting—she slapped me once for calling her a bitch, which I suppose was a pretty legitimate reason for slapping someone. It was the best weekend of my life.

The only problem was that I was hungry. They brought food by for Tia every day, but they seem to have totally forgotten about me. It had been three days now, and I was still a newborn—I _needed _food, I needed to _eat. _Tia was safe as long as she kept taking her pills every morning, but it was hard to be so close to her when I was so hungry. I had already ended up biting her a few times, just caught up in the moment and suddenly my teeth were in her skin—I didn't mean to do it, but it happened. She always yelled at me when it did happen and usually sulked for an hour or so, but there was that incredible draw between us, like a magnetic field. She couldn't stay mad.

"Hey, you're going to be okay, right?" I asked after I'd bitten her one time. "I mean, my venom keeps getting into you, are you sure it's not going to turn you into a vampire?"

"No, the pills prevent that," she said crankily, dabbing the blood from her arm. "Of course it wouldn't be a _problem _if you would stop _biting _me all the time."

"I said I was sorry about that," I said defensively. "Those must be some pills."

"I guess," she said cryptically, staring at the bottle of pills where she'd set them on the windowsill this morning. They'd done some work on our window after that little escape attempt—it was now less a window than a smaller version of the steel door, with a few long slits at the top letting the light in. "They're not as magical as you think they are."

"What do you mean by that?" I said warily, suddenly concerned at the tone in her voice.

"I mean that they're not doing me any favors," she said shortly. "I suppose they're saving me in the short term, but there are a lot of things in them…" She shrugged gracefully. "Lord Amun said if I keep taking them, I'll be dead in five years."

I was floored. "Tia—you can't be serious…why would you…?"

"He handed them to me and told me to make a decision," Tia said, and her chin came up, defensive, princessy. "I made my decision, Ben."

"Tia," I said, not entirely aware of what I was saying. I would blame shock later, if it turned out to be something dumb. "I don't want you to die."

"You're dead," Tia said. "Doesn't seem like it's slowed you down much."

"Don't be stupid, Tia," I said, rubbing my eyes with the heel of my hand.

"I am never stupid," she said coldly, and turned away from me.

"Oh, yeah, because taking poisonous pills day after day is really brilliant," I snapped, still upset from this new bit of information. Possibly reacting badly.

Tia laid back on the bed and crossed her ankles, staring fixedly at the ceiling. She was excellent at ignoring me when she put her mind to it. Also she was getting better at making me feel sorry for her—because I used to not care if she was throwing fits or pouting, I used to go out of my way to actively antagonize her. But that was before I found out how beautiful she was when she smiled.

"Hey," I said, crawling over her on the bed, one hand on either side of her shoulder. "Hey, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to yell."

"Yes you did," she said icily, glaring straight up into my eyes. "Don't touch me."

I exhaled and moved back, coming to sit on the edge of the bed. We couldn't be together, could we? How could we make this work? We were going to kill each other, it didn't even matter how long it took. Eventually, we _were _going to kill each other.

I had these thoughts all the time, but it was just that they usually got swept away the first time she touched me or looked over at me with her huge brown eyes. I kept thinking that it couldn't work, right up until the moment that it did.

I heard her come up behind me, and I felt her arms slide around my neck, her lips pressing against the top of my ear. "I'm sorry," she said, and I wondered if she'd ever said that before in her life. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. You can touch me if you want to."

And so I did.

---

It was unfortunate that Tia had to sleep. We always stayed up until she was absolutely falling over, and then she slept for six hours or so, then woke up and jumped on me. But for those six hours or so, I got to be very, very bored. I couldn't even sit on the sill and look out the window, unless I wanted the lovely view of sheet steel three inches from my face. Usually I sat on the floor by the doorway and just watched her while she slept.

When she was awake, she was so vibrant and full of life, leaving trails of fire where she moved. She was a thing not possible to ignore. But when she slept, she looked so—fragile. All the fire drained out of her face and left it looking young and sweet, defenseless. She made me worried when she slept. This whole weekend I'd had to be concerned about hurting her, breaking her somehow—I mean, when you were wrestling around with someone on a bed, it was often tricky to remember to be careful. I still had all this strength that I didn't much know what to do with, how to control it, and it was possible that I could accidentally hurt her.

She'd been very good, though, about letting me know what worked and what didn't. She had just been _Tia_—she yelled at me when I started to hurt her, corrected my grip or pushed me back. She was an extremely capable girl, and as long as she kept guiding me I felt that I didn't have to worry. But when she slept she looked so fragile. It made me worry about the soft bruises on her arms, the bite marks on her shoulders and neck. If something were to happen to her, we wouldn't even have the option of turning her into a vampire. She'd just be dead.

At least, that was the case until she woke up one morning and, yawning and stretching, walked over to the windowsill to get her pills. And opened the bottle, and looked inside. And swore loudly, throwing the bottle across the room.

I was startled. I'd never heard her swear before in my life, I'd gotten the impression that it wasn't particularly…ladylike. Something must be very, very wrong. "What?" I asked, standing. "What is it?"

"My _pills," _she said, one hand coming up quickly and pushing her hair back. "My pills, Benjamin. They're gone. I don't have any more."

Panic raced up my spine and out through my bones, out to the tips of my fingerbones. "You're _out?_" I said, snatching up the pill container where she'd thrown it, and sure enough. Nothing in it. Bad bad bad bad bad. "How could you let yourself run out? Tia—"

"No, don't come near me," she said, throwing out a hand at once. "Get away from me, Benjamin, I don't want to die."

I wanted to say _I won't hurt you, _but the way her blood was pounding from panic—the way it was pressed up against her pale paper skin. I knew I couldn't make that promise. I hadn't eaten in four days, and I was _hungry. _And I was locked in with her.

I turned and banged on the steel door, yelling, "Hey! Hey, we need some help in here! Open up, we need some _help!_"

I heard my voice echo down the corridor, bouncing off the walls. No one answered.


	14. Chapter 14

We were sitting as far apart as we possibly could. Which was not, if you really wanted to get picky about it—technically very far apart at all. It was a small cell. There was a bed, there was a window, there were four walls close enough together that the possibility of them closing in on you started to seem more and more likely every day. When you were kissing a beautiful girl and only really needed enough space in which to kiss her—which thousands in the fine tradition of broom-closest kissing could attest, didn't need to be much—well, the room seemed to do just fine. But when you were suddenly expected not to kill her even though you really, really wanted to and most likely would? That was different.

"How could you let this happen?" I said, even though I knew it was a bad idea even as I was saying it.

"How could _I _let this happen?" She had her knees tucked up against her chest, sitting in the corner of the room across from me, but I could feel her glare from here. "I didn't do anything, Benjamin! This is not my fault!"

"I just don't understand how you could have _not _noticed that you were out of pills," I said, trying to generate a good glare of my own, but I just couldn't match her. She was a girl. "Didn't the container feel weirdly _light _or something? Like maybe you were _running out of pills?_"

"I'm sorry if I was a little _distracted," _she shot back. "You might recall it because _you were there!_"

"Oh, so this is my fault?"

"Maybe," she said, completely unashamed. "Maybe a little! You could at least take part of the blame for it!"

"Why would I do that?"

"That would be a very gentlemanly thing to do!" she said with a bright note of hysteria in her voice. "That would be very chivalrous!"

I put my head in my hands and made a noise that I hoped she couldn't hear—despite all evidence to the contrary, I didn't like being yelled at. "We need to get out of here," I said. "We need to get you out of here."

"I'm sure they'll bring me some more pills," she said with admirable composure, clamping back down on the panic. That was the difference between Tia and me. Tia could deal with anything. Tia could get a headlock on a situation and straight shut it down, she could handle _anything_. I could handle nothing.

"They're not going to bring you more pills," I said, trying to be realistic. Or possibly blowing things massively out of proportion in order to make us both lose our minds, but I wasn't _trying _to do that. "What, do you think that Amun has a sticky note on his calendar, 'bring Tia more pills'? Is that what you think?"

"He needs me," Tia said firmly, choosing to hang onto the facts. "He needs me. And anyway we can just wait until someone comes to bring me my food tonight, and we can tell them—"

"Do you honestly think I'm going to make it that long?" I exploded. "Tia, you have _no _idea how hard it is for me to just keep sitting here. Maybe if you could just—calm down, maybe you could just…make your heartbeat slower?"

"Make my heartbeat slower," she repeated flatly.

"Yes," I said uncertainly. I was starting to see flaws in this plan. "Just breathe…slower—never mind. We have to get out of here."

I stood up and walked to the window, which took me dangerously close to her, but it was unavoidable. I just had to stop for a minute, take a deep breath, and hold it. Try to stop thinking about how hungry I was, how good she looked in an entirely unromantic and carnivorous way. I looked away from her and put my hands on the steel-covered window.

"That's not going to come out," she said. "Unless you have some previously undiscovered power over stainless steel."

"I don't think I do," I frowned. "I don't suppose you have a crowbar?"

"You're a _vampire,_" she said.

"Oh, what, that's suddenly a problem?"

"Hush," she said quellingly. "I'm saying you should just punch the stupid window out, or something. Can't you do that?"

"I don't think so," I said, sizing the window up again.

"What do I keep you around for?"

"And here I was thinking that you liked me for my steel-punching abilities," I said. "You know what? Maybe I can. It's not like I've tried, and I don't think I can break any bones…"

"So?" she said impatiently, standing up beside me. "What are you waiting for?"

Standing up had brought her far too close to me. She was still two or three feet away, but it was too close. Before I knew it I was swinging around to her, reaching out for her arm. She had enough sense to snatch it back from me, but to my surprise a snarl broke from my throat and I was still moving toward her.

_Cut that out, _I told myself in my sternest mental voice, but I had her pinned against a wall now, and it was hard to focus on things that weren't her. _You are _not _going to kill her, you will _so _regret it later. You are _not _going to kill her. She's your girlfriend, she is not for eating! _

"Don't," she said, helping me out with an impressive stern voice of her own. She wasn't moving at all to stop me, she was smarter than to try, it would just kick in my predator instincts. "Benjamin. Don't you dare."

I put one hand on either side of her and leaned in—and then, fortunately, there was a loud horrible noise—like someone taking a bite out of hubcap and chewing it. My body snapped around to it, thank God, and the noise was coming after the window cover—where the steel had suddenly dented in, convexing.

It was a good distraction. Tia took the opportunity to immediately slip out from behind me and get to the other side of the room. I was reigning myself back anyway, able to shake off the hunger temporarily in favor of the fact that someone seemed to be trying to kick in our window. Tia had suggested earlier that I try to get rid of the sheet metal, but I'd never gotten around to it. Someone had beaten me to it.

"What the hell?" I said intelligently. I wanted to go over there and protect Tia, I wanted to stand in front of her and put my arms around her, but I couldn't. I couldn't get that close.

"Don't look at me," she said, calm even though she'd almost just been killed and even though there was a second loud noise just then, the imprint of a blow shuddering through the metal plate. She was unfazable. "I don't know what's happening."

This was alarming, and it didn't make any sense. Someone was obviously trying to get into our cell, but they seemed to be doing it by the weirdest means possible. If anyone around here wanted to see us, they could go straight in through the door. In fact, the only people in this complex at all were Lord Amun, Kebi, possibly Marek, and a lot of guards. None of them had reasons to smash in our window.

"What should we do?" I asked, my eyes fixed on the window sheet as it shuddered under another blow.

"We can't do anything," Tia said, in a tone that said _isn't that great? _

The window broke. The corner burst open, and a hand was suddenly visible, at least for a moment until it pulled back out of the hole. I watched it quickly as if I could identify the person by the length of their fingers or the size of their knuckles, but the hand was gone. The fingers did return, though, wrapping around the edge of the metal sheet and peeling it slowly back with a grinding metal noise. Like someone pulling a can apart for loss of a can opener.

_Maybe it's Kebi, _I thought wildly to myself. _She's always doing weird things, right? She's always doing things that don't make sense. This doesn't make sense! _But they didn't seem like girl hands. I hadn't seen much of them yet, but Kebi had very pale, very small hands, and I didn't think those were them.

_Maybe it's Marek, _I decided instead. _Maybe he's not dead, maybe he escaped and he's trying to get us out too? Maybe he was worried about us? _

But the window was pulled back almost three quarters of the way now, enough for the person to pull themselves up onto the windowsill and wriggle through the created space, falling gracefully to the floor of our cell.

The first thing he did was turn back around and pull the window closed. I didn't know really what he meant by it—now that it had been opened once, surely it would just open right back up easily, but he put some effort into clamping the metal back onto the windowframe. If anyone wanted to get it back open, it would at least take a good few seconds. And that was only if it was me—Tia likely wouldn't be able to get it back open at all.

By the time the man turned back around, it was clear who he was. Skinny frame with clothes that bagged around his knees and elbows, face that looked like it had taken a good blow from a frying pan. It was, quite obviously, Suliman.

Only that wasn't possible. Suliman was dead. I'd drained half his blood and left him bleeding in a gutter, and even Suliman on his best day couldn't exactly pry up a sheet of steel.

But suddenly that all made sense. Because I'd left him, hadn't I? I'd left him there in the street with his veins full of my venom. And when I looked closer at him, I could clearly see that his eyes were bright blood red.

"Tia," I said. "We have a problem."


	15. Chapter 15

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Sorry about the delay! Holiday weekend ski trip :).

---

"Hey," I tsaid immediately. "Sorry about turning you into a vampire."

It was worth a try, okay? There was always the possibility that Suliman had showed up in order to thank me, to tell me how nice it had been for me to give him all this immortality and unlimited power and stuff. Though I did remember how I'd reacted when Amun had told me the same thing.

Suliman had basically the same reaction. A guttural low snarl rolled out of his throat, nonverbal response that managed to convey his message anyway. He just didn't seem terribly—human. I guess he hadn't had a mentor standing over him as he made the change, telling him how to act and how to prevent being a monster. He wouldn't have even known what was happening to him—he wouldn't have known what he'd become.

I managed to feel sorry for him for about ten seconds, right up until the part where he tackled me into the wall.

I was actually surprised that he didn't go after Tia first, she being the delicious human in the room and all—I'd been gearing up to catch him when he did, to get between them—but when I looked at him that was hate in his eyes. No mistaking it. He'd turned into a vampire and he had come straight for me, first thing that he did. I couldn't understand what I'd done to make him hate me so much. Surely this wasn't still about me turning things upside down? How could anyone hold a grudge so long?  
I got my hands between us and threw him back, but it was harder than I expected it to be. I was used to being the strongest person in the room by virtue of my birth date—Marek had explained all about being a newborn, and being slightly out of control and ridiculously strong, which was a _great _combo. I wasn't used to anyone being younger than me and so I wasn't used to anyone being stronger. Suliman was stronger.

Something hit Suliman hard from behind, right in the back of the head, and as it fell away we saw it was a shoe. A light pink high heeled shoe. Suliman was distracted instantly, turning to Tia in the other corner, how stupid could she _be? _

"Tia!" I yelled. "What are you _doing? _Get out of here!"

"Ha!" she yelled back as I grabbed Suliman by the back of his shirt, dragging him away from her. "Can't! And don't tell me what to do!"

I sighed and threw Suliman back into the wall, getting between him and Tia at least if I couldn't do any more. I couldn't help the irrational thought that somehow she'd set it up this way on purpose, just to frustrate me. Of course that was ridiculous, but I was okay with that. Being mildly irritated with Tia was way better than terrified for Tia's life.

Now would be a good time to figure out how to control my abilities. I wasn't sure if panic was an okay motivation, but I wasn't angry yet. I hadn't gotten angry. I grabbed for the stagnant air currents anyway, but my mind-fingers slipped right through them—I couldn't remember how I'd latched onto them before, I couldn't remember how I'd gotten them. I needed them _now. _

Suliman tore my grip loose and grabbed me by the throat—I didn't need to breathe but still it was a problem, my neck was the easiest thing to grab if he wanted to tear my head off. I kicked him in the kneecap as hard as I could—it was an old standby move, I'd been breaking kneecaps since I was eleven, don't ask how I learned. Of course it was considerably less effective if you were kicking a vampire.

I reached out with my mind to the stale air—there was no fire in here and the walls were made of steel, it was my only ally and it was acting like an offended girlfriend. _Please, _I said, not making a grab for it this time, just holding my hands out to it, _please. I just need to use you. It won't hurt. Please please. _

To my surprise, I felt the twisting ropes of air slip into my control, snaking themselves bonelessly into my mind-hands like a kitten twining itself between legs. I was so surprised that at first I just held them, frozen to see if they would leave again. Then I closed my hands around them and _threw _them at Suliman as hard as I could, slamming him with a solid wall of air.

His eyes flew open and then he flew backwards, hitting the far wall with a sickening thud. The right side of his body bounced hard off the bedframe on the way to the wall, crumpling in the front corner with the indent of his body. He was harder than the cheap aluminum.

It was an impressive, insanely supernatural move, and I stood there in shock for a minute looking at my own hands. Unfortunately, it wasn't as cool as I thought it was, because I'd slammed him back to the spot in the wall that was directly between the bed frame and Tia.

I zeroed in on her like the room was collapsing in on itself, it was all suddenly clicking together in my brain—where she was, where Suliman was, where I'd _put _him and why it was a horrible and stupid mistake. And he looked at me. And he watched me looking at her. He saw me _panicking. _

I felt the long ropes of air slip through my hands again, and I scrambled after them, I _needed _them, we were all frozen like animals who've just caught sight of a predator, and I needed to be the one who made the first move. Because he was two feet from her, if he made the first move there wouldn't be time for a second one.

He beat me to it—he reached down and grabbed hold of the bed and swung it at me full force, hard enough that two legs embedded themselves into the steel walls an inch deep, crumpling with the impact as they hit the wall and my head and chest. Blocking my body and my line of sight for long enough that I heard Tia scream in the second before I tore it away.

I had never heard her scream before. She had been through a lot since I'd met her, been bitten, been threatened, been splattered with other people's blood. She had never even come close to screaming, never blinked, never startled. Her scream was lower than I expected, lower than her voice—usually when people screamed, it jumped up an octave. Tia's voice jumped down into her throat, and it sounded like terror.

Even before I threw the bedframe away, I knew what had happened. He had his hands on her and his teeth in her, and I knew I could get there before he killed her. But that didn't matter at all.

It was just his teeth in her, that was all. It was just that from the moment they broke her skin, the fight was over. I had lost, she had lost, I had lost her. She hadn't taken her pills today.

I had the memory of the pain of the change, the soul-twisting sear of it—I had the memory of opening your eyes to the thirst that seemed not to ever stop, hadn't stopped since it had gotten hold of me. Of finding out that this was the rest of your life, that you were just a monster and you drank people's blood, and your world that you'd known before? Gone. You'd been torn out of it, like someone had punched a hole. You were now just a vampire. And you had _no _say in the matter.

My mind connected these memories with Tia, with the way she would have to be now that he'd bitten her right where her shoulder met her neck—and there was some sort of chemical reaction. Maybe he hadn't killed her, but he'd taken her soul. He'd done worse. It blew something up inside of me, and the edges of my vision went _red. _

I yelled something unintelligible, and the noise of a loud _crack _covered my words, an earthshaking sound of marble and metal. The floor tore down the middle like it was nothing but paper, the steel rending in one long tear to reveal the stone under it, fissuring to break the metal. Opening up like a mouth with jagged fragment teeth, and a mouth with a very specific idea of what it was meant to eat. The floor disappeared out from under Suliman's feet.

As he slipped into the surprising new chasm, I suddenly saw the consequences of getting rid of him—he was still holding onto Tia and he toppled her over with him, pulling her into the hole, and I got there just barely in time to grab her arm and pull her back up. The problem was, Suliman was still holding onto her, too, determinedly attached to her feet near the bottom of the rift. If I pulled her up, I would pull both of them up. But her eyes were huge as she looked up at me, and I could feel her starting to shake through my hands, long spasms that shuddered through her body. I knew what was happening to her.

So I pulled hard on her arm, dragging her up, and at the same time I slammed the bottom of the chasm shut, crunching it closed on Suliman's legs and waist. He yelled and let go, just as I had intended, and I yanked Tia quickly up onto the floor.

I scrambled to my feet, backing away from where Suliman was scrabbling at the marble with his hands, tearing chunks out of it and snarling, his mouth foam-flecked like a rabid animal. I had a sudden flash of clarity—_I could have been that. _If it hadn't been for Marek, I would have been that. But creatures like this did not belong in the world.

I closed the rift completely with a vindictive _snap_, and there was no more sound from Suliman. But there was sound from Tia. She was laying on the floor where I'd thrown her, twitching like she was having a seizure, her back arching, one hand clapped over the bite. She was making sounds like half-killed screams, barely making it out of her mouth as painful choked noises that made me want to scream myself.

I dropped to my knees beside her, trying to hold her head and shoulders steady. I had no idea how to do this. I wasn't Marek and Marek wasn't here—it was just me. She was turning into a vampire, and I loved her. Those things were connected somehow.

"I love you," I said helplessly, uselessly. "I love you. It's going to be okay."

She was looking straight past me with rolled-back eyes, she wasn't hearing me—her mouth opened and she started to scream.


	16. Chapter 16

I was not great at handling emergencies by myself. I could handle them if I had to, but I usually preferred to have other, more experienced, less spastic, people around to advise and stabilize me. For example, when Tia got bitten, what I wished for most of all was for Marek to be there. Marek seemed to be an expert at this kind of thing, and he was extremely levelheaded where I was mostly crooked-headed instead.

I wished he was here. I wished my father was here—his medical expertise hadn't, as far as I'd known, extended to vampiric transformations, but you never knew. I even wished Lord Amun was here—at least he could tell me what I was supposed to do. I was wishing for anybody and everybody, but I have to say, I never once wished that Kebi would be here.

So of course that was who I got. She came in through the door and not the window, so at least I saw her coming. Not that that helped much—she was alarming even from a mile away, she walked with that cloud of craziness and frazzled ends floating around her. She did not make me feel calmer—she made me feel like panicking.

"Kebi!" I said, immediately putting myself between her and Tia. I'd managed to get Tia up onto the bed, but this bed didn't have restraints. I'd been having to watch her carefully to make sure she didn't hurt herself or try anything—I didn't know how long this was supposed to take. I didn't know at what point she would wake up and be a red-eyed, ravenous monster, and it was making me nervous. "Hi! What are you doing here?"

She walked straight past me to Tia's bed, and I didn't even think to stop her. It was hard to stop Kebi, anyway—she focused on things in a way that made everything else seem suddenly less real, less important. And there was no denying that Tia was what was important right now.

Kebi put the back of her hand on Tia's forehead like a mother checking her temperature, patiently pinning Tia's hand down when she tried to claw at her. "She's with the devil," Kebi informed me. "Don't be worried, spider, he'll give her back. You should leave."

"I should _leave?_" She'd have to drag me out or kill me, and either of those things would be difficult now that I'd figured out how to make earthquakes. "I'm not leaving her, she's _dying, _she needs to see me when she wakes up, I need to explain—"

"She won't remember you," Kebi said bluntly. "Her mind is burning up, there'll be only smoke left after. She'll have eight legs and long teeth, and you won't be able to help her. You should get the tall man."

"The who—?" I spluttered in the seconds before it clicked. "_Marek?_ He's alive?"

"He's alive or dead," she said vaguely. "He's on the mountain."

"Which means _what?_" I demanded impatiently. Craziness was only acceptable when it wasn't getting in my way. "What are you saying, Kebi?"

She was already busy with Tia, and she fluttered her hand at me. "Go down the hall, Benjamin. He's down the hall, leave her alone, she's on fire."

I glanced back at Tia one more time, unsure, but what she'd just told me—Marek was still alive? Really? I had to be sure.

"Tia," I said, as if she could hear me. "Tia, I will be _right back._" It was surprising, but I actually trusted Kebi with her—in fact, Kebi would be better than me at this point, I had _no _idea what the hell I was doing. I didn't trust her with a dozen eggs, but I trusted her with Tia. Until I could bring Marek back, that was. I needed Marek to be here for Tia.

I stumbled out into the hallway, still trying to make sense of anything she'd said. Down the hall, _where _down the hall and where was I supposed to be going? There were dozens of doors, I didn't know what I was doing. Huge surprise.

"Marek!" I yelled vaguely, walking down the hallway. I knew there had to be guards around here somewhere, probably close, this _was _a cellblock. "Marek, are you—around here somewhere? Can you, um…hear me?"

I stopped in the middle of the hallway, feeling stupid all the way down through the soles of my shoes. I was helping no one here—I hadn't helped Tia, in fact, I'd left her alone in a prison cell with a crazy woman—and now here I was, not helping Marek. I was great at this.

I was just about to disappear into a sad black hole of self pity, and then I heard his voice. "Ben?" The words were muffled, and I wasn't standing in front of the right door by a long ways, but that was him. That was Marek's voice. "Benjamin? You've got to be kidding. Is that you?"

"Yes!" I said, too loudly, following his voice down the hallway to the door on the very end. "It's me! I came to get you out—how should I, um…how should I do that?"

"How the hell should I know?" he yelled back crankily. "What are you _doing, _Ben? What are you doing out here?"

"I thought you were dead!" I said, not answering any of his questions, I was close to hysterical and had been for a good few hours now. "I thought they killed you! Kebi told me that you were on the mountain—"

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said, and I could hear his irritation even through the steel door. "Get me out of here, kid. Is there a key? Do you see any—?"

"I can open it!" I assured him. "I can get it open, it's okay. You should have seen what I just did, I made this earthquake, and—"

"Okay, fine," he said impatiently. "Do it. Get me out!"

"Okay!" I said, and stepped back from the door. "Okay." I tried to focus on the stone floor, trying to find a way to suggest it should maybe split like it had before, trying to tear it apart with my mind. Why couldn't I _do _this without being completely stressed out? And how stressed out did I need to _be, _I was practically bouncing off the walls! This was the least convenient power ever.

"Benjamin!"

"I'm _working _on it, okay?"

"You want to work on it a little faster? There are—"

"Guards?"

It wasn't a lucky guess. I had turned around and come face to face with one of Amun's walking walls, and the expression on his face said he _knew _I was not supposed to be there. This was awkward.

The man was snapping his baton out already, swiping for me, and it was important for me to figure out right away if this guy was human or vampire. I knew that Amun had a mix of both, and I didn't know how he worked that exactly, but somehow it did. Surely he wouldn't be stupid enough to have a human guarding vampires.

But he was. It was somehow my lucky day, and this guy was human. I grabbed his baton as he swung it at me, seeming impossibly slow, and I twisted it out of his hands, shoving him back into the wall. His head cracked back against the steel of the door, and the smell of blood sprang instantly into the air, hot copper and irresistible. Yum.

"Benjamin?" Marek yelled. "What's going on out there? What's happening?"

"Nothing!" I said, making a last futile attempt to tell myself that now was not the time to be snacking as I grabbed the guard by both arms. It had been so _long _since I had eaten, it had been _days. _"Nothing, nothing. Hang on."

The man didn't yell as I bit into him, and that reminded me of something. Should have set off some alarms, but I was too busy with his blood. I was so hungry, I was so ridiculously hungry. It should have tasted like milk and honey, chocolate frosting, it should have tasted like the nectar of the gods. It tasted _terrible. _

And now that alarm was finally going off. I let go instantly and fell back from the man, spitting his blood. His poisoned blood. "Son of a _bitch!_" I yelled.

"What _is _it?" Marek demanded.

"Nothing!" I said, but I was starting to feel a little fuzzy around the edges. I remembered Tia saying _pills, _and _poison, _and a lot of other unpleasant things that started with P. This was just like Amun, this was _just _like him. To drug his employees like they were drinks at a party, to booby trap _people _and then put them in your way. I wasn't feeling so good. "I'm just—it's just—I don't know, Marek! I'm feeling a little strange right now!"

"Benjamin." I could imagine his facial expression on the other side of the door, the calm firmness he would have, the slight quirk of his eyebrow. He was the only person I had met who really knew how to handle me, to tell me exactly the right thing to do. Unfortunately, he didn't know about any of the stupid things I'd done just now, so he wasn't advising me on _that. _"Get the key. Find the key _now, _unlock this door, and get me out of here."

"Key," I mumbled, and I was falling over myself trying to get down the wall where the guard had slumped, half-conscious and bleeding all over the nice flooring. "Key. Right. Okay."

I could feel the floor starting to shake under me, or maybe it was me shaking but it felt like it was the stone under my feet. I felt drunk, I felt groggy and panicked, like someone was pressing a pillow over my face. My fingers seemed thick and impossible, but I found a keyring in the pocket of his jacket. It wasn't a huge cartoonish ring like I suppose I'd expected from a jail guard, but just a set of keys with some stupid keychains and a bunch of keys.

There was one big one that looked like the same metal as the lock, to big to be a house key or a mail key. This had to be the one. But when I tried to stand and walk to the door, I couldn't do it. My legs had gone completely numb, they wouldn't support me at all, even just to stand up.

So I crawled. I got on my knees and I dragged myself the rest of the way to the door, and I got that key in the lock. I was done here, I was going out and I didn't know if was going to ever open my eyes again. Tia was still back there, halfway to a vampire, and Amun was still horrible and needing to be killed. Marek could take care of it all. I just had to make sure this door got unlocked.

The key turned partly and I tried to make my hand keep gripping it, but my sight was almost black now, gray turning to black. You could hit me with a pile driver, you could drop a ton of bricks on my head and I would not blink. I was rock solid. Get something inside of me, though—and I would feel my hand slipping from the key I needed, and my vision would fold in and swallow me up in blackness.


	17. Chapter 17

NOTICE:

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Sorry about the delay, guys. I never intended to start this story and not finish it, and I still don't. I've been dealing with a personal tragedy, and I'm just starting to get the pieces sorted back out again. I still need a little time to deal with what's been going on in my life, but I swear I will be back and I will finish both this fic and "Candy Hearts". I guess you could just say they're on a little bit of a hiatus. It'll actually even be sooner rather than later--it's taken me this long just to realize I should probably have put up some kind of note telling y'all what's going on. Thank you so much for your patience! I'll be back soon.

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xx CARA


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